Home » Forum » Mac Intel

Should OS X run on generic PCs?

Posted June 12th, 2005 by mike

The current developer's build of OS X 10.4 for Intel will run on standard PCs. Most likely that will change for the release version. Should Apple allow OS X to run on non-Apple hardware? Discuss the pros & cons here.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
‹ Porting to Intel

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Not that easy

On June 18th, 2005 Emmanuel says:

Drivers for OSX aren't straight out of FreeBSD. They're written
to use the IOKit and other Darwin-specific things. However,
Darwin does run on quite a few generic PCs and OSX would be
able to use that.

I however don't think it's a good idea. OSX is about a consistent
user experience, where everything just works - and that means
using well-defined hardware that has been tested for proper
interoperability with all Mac software. I'm a switcher myself
and even though I'm a programmer, I have better to do than
fiddle with drivers when I want to get work done - that's what
attracted me to the Mac in the first place.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

Cartoon minigolf game

osx on intel - but not all intel machines

On June 12th, 2005 Anonymous says:

I agree w/Apples philosophy. Putting osx onto all intel plaforms would be a really bad move. Support costs a lot of money, and the costs of supporting every platform could hurt apple badly.

However, I do think they should partner with a mainstream company who produces stylish looking machines. The only one I can think of now is Sony. Their FX series 15" laptops are really nice, spoiled only by the need to load them up with a boatload of anti virus, spyware and other pest control programs.

My mac mini at 1.42ghz/1mb actually feels faster than my 1.73ghz/1mb sony laptop, and I am sure that if I could run os/x on the laptop, it would run a lot faster. Ofcourse..my choice of sony is completely selfserving since I own one :)

Why not...

On June 16th, 2005 Anonymous says:

From what I understand, it's based on FreeBSD and that runs on generic PCs...

There must be a bunch of hardware driver already available in FreeBSD that could be re-packaged with future OSX releases.

I think everything is possible from the technical side because of that.

I believe this is more a marketing challenge than a technical challenge for Apple. Who knows if they will decide to support non-apple hardware.

Now what about Microsoft? Will they market XP on intel-apple computers? If is intel based, they could manage to do that as well!