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journal: mac
What’s Being Said About Mac OS X on Intel on Regular PC’s
Official Macs with Intel processors don’t ship until mid-2006 but days ago a developer copy of Tiger was cracked to run on many ordinary PC’s. A HardMac.com video shows a recent Dell laptop booting OS X rather speedily and there is reported success using iTunes, digital cameras, and thirdy-party applications. Why has Apple made its OS a tempting target for bootleggers?
Although every software protection scheme has the potential to be broken, John Dvorak, the notorious PC Magazine columnist, views Apple’s choice of protection a particularly vulnerable one and explains why that is a good thing for them. “...I’m now convinced that [the weak protection of the developer release] is all a publicity stunt and the Apple community is being used—once again—by the company’s marketing department...I see the OS getting out in the wild as having the opposite effect. For one thing, it would increase interest amongst developers, which should boost overall sales.”
Mr. Dvorak adds that it should not hurt sales. “Besides, I’m completely convinced that Apple could still get the same premium for its machines that it does today. People simply like the design of Apple gear. Just look at the sales of the overpriced iPod in a market glutted with MP3 players. Why does anyone buy one? How is this ga-ga mentality different with computers?”
“This is ingenious. Allow bootlegged copies to circulate among PC geeks and die-hards. Allow them to see how much better OSX is, and then when Apple upgrades to Leopard, the PC horde will either buy it or pirate it until OSX becomes so ingrained, it becomes market leader,” says Lacero on the MacRumors.com forum.
Influential power users will invest their time and the risk of breaking laws to load copies of Tiger onto their PC’s and test out OS X. They like what they see and whether or not they buy it, Apple moves one step closer to being the standard in homes. What are the downsides?
In my home, we won’t be bootlegging OS X. For my brother’s birthday I’d love to buy him iLife ‘05 with GarageBand for his Dell. He just wants to create new music and have fun. I guess he’ll have to wait for us to buy a new computer and in the meantime he can borrow my laptop. We want something stable and legal in our house.
More Info
“Apple on the Brink” By John C. Dvorak
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thinkback
I don’t think Apple will ever support OS X running on non-Apple PC’s, even if it does become a widespread phenomenon of downloading a cracked version. They may not take action and allow it to happen, but they won’t endorse it.
Just remember this… Apple is a hardware company. They make billions of dollars selling Macintosh computers. They do not make billions of dollars selling software; they make a couple hundred million per year. OS X is essentially a gimmick to get people to buy their hardware. Therefore, Apple will do whatever is necessary to protect their hardware market. It might seem pretentious, it might seem snooty, it might seem whatever, but they have interests to protect, and protect them they will.
| Aug. 15, 2005 | |
| Arden | 4:04 pm |
Like they have done with their ‘continuous firmware update’ strategy with iPods and iTunes to shirk the Real Networks reverse-engineering monkey, Apple will continuously require firmware updates to Macintels that block out hacked code.
And it will get REAL tedious REAL fast to rehack continuously in order to run a hacked Mac OS X on a non-Apple Intel machine.
And the ‘Geez Whiz Mac OS on Dell PCs’ will go no further than, well, a handful of gee-whiz PCs.
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Careful with Dvorak… he’s very easily convinced (though in 20 years I’m not sure who is convincing him yet). Apple does not (yet) want to cannibalize their high margin hardware sales. I expect Apple to eventually sell their software for run of the mill PC’s, but not until they reach a critical mass of say 12-20% of the market. Apple’s viewpoint has got to be that the cost of supporting myriad hardware has got to be offset by volume of software sales, and they aren’t going to gamble on that.
Count on the public reaction/uptake of Longhorn to drastically influence this timetable.