Journal: News & Comment

Is that Hell freezing over?

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The Apple switches to Intel rumours, bubbling for years and years, have finally come true. I'm sure everything will work out fine. My one hope: no "Intel Inside" stickers. Sticker mania is one of the things that mars Windows computers.

I found this particularly interesting:

Mac OS X has been "leading a secret double life" for the past five years, said Jobs. "So today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years."

Of course, this is not "Mac OS X will run on Windows PCs." Far from it. I expect the upcoming Intel-based Macs will have all the usual proprietary Apple hardware stuff otherwise: boot ROM, motherboard designs, etc.—so how much of a hack will it take to make a generic white box PC run Mac OS X-Intel, I wonder? How about AMD-based machines? It's likely to be substantial, but the previous performance penalties of translating PPC to x86 code would no longer apply.

Hmm, Microsoft Virtual Mac for Windows, anyone?

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