[Cialug] Apple and Intel

[D. Joe Anderson]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 10:35:02PM -0500, Bryan Baker wrote:
> On Jun 7, 2005, at 10:29 PM, Nathan C. Smith wrote:

> >So here's a stupid question - what kind of thing will keep me
> >from buying Mac OS and slapping it on any Intel box?  I
> >thought all the stuff that used to be in ROM no longer was. 
> >What will distinguish an Apple from any other machine?

> I'm betting they will have a hand at least in the mobo design, they  
> do a bunch of their own ASICs, etc. and they have been using  
> OpenFirmware - not BIOS, but that may change now, but I bet there'll  
> be other diff's - that said I give it a couple weeks before someone  
> comes out w/ a hack, but you can bet it won't get support.

That, and what this guy said (after you skip down past all the
license flamewar cruft) in

http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2005-June/011207.html

    Mac OS X's demographic is precisely the opposite of those
    with enough technical skill to hack and/or patch enough of
    their operating system to make it run on non-Apple hardware. 
    Even if someone managed to make that work, and found a way
    to hack in driver support, either through some Rube Goldberg
    linux-driver-wrapper horseshit or other, it wouldn't be
    terribly useful to terribly many people who leave their
    basement on a regular basis.

The "not [...] terribly many people" who would be interested in
doing this are pretty much the Mac fans who inhabit Linux and
other free OS mailing lists like this one--a minority of a
minority.  Heck, I figure I probably know the majority of these
people who live in Iowa ;-)

ie, not enough to affect their market significantly.

outside of this, the Mac customers are either going to be the
ricer-wannabees who might think the hack is cool, but who don't
have the time/skill/whatever to actually apply it, and the
people like the ones Valentine mentions above, who want their
sealed-box to Just Work, they don't care how, and you can't make
them care.   

The main thing is that someone who does care, and who does have
the skill to apply the hacks isn't going to be able to hang out
a shingle and go into business selling beige boxes that have
been Macified.  The Clone Wars have already been fought, we know
how that turned out, and that was before the DMCA.

-- 
D. Joe Anderson         http://www.etrumeus.com/~deejoe
"DRM [...] is to copyright law as a machine gun on                                          
a motion detector is to real estate law"  -- Don Marti