Comments on: Mac OS X hacked to run on PCs

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 09:54:39 +0000

The moment the decision was made to run MacOS on Intel machines, it should have been obvious to anyone involved that sooner or later, someone will hack it to run on “regular” PC’s.

Any maybe it’s the conspiracy theorist in me, but I guess they very well knew what they did.

I guess in 2-3 years, you can decide upon purchase whether your PC will run Windows or MacOS, and many PC’s will run both with a boot-switcher. This will push Apples marketshare finally to 50% – or to 100% with a total market of 200%.

And I’m pretty sure that is what Steve Jobs is dreaming about all along.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:51:22 +0000

I think it’s a complete non issue. Sure some people may be able to do it when the final version comes out (expect it to look for codes in the hardware etc.) but that’s gonna be a tiny subset of people.

Besides that even the guys who I read got it working today didn’t have the specs they needed to get everything working so we can assume that it’s going to be very dependent on what hardware config you have.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 13:30:33 +0000

The most telling point in that article is:

“It seems like getting around the TPM wasn’t that hard, according to a hacker nicknamed “parch,” who said, “Apple could have made the lock heavier.”

It’s probably not in their interest to close the door right now as they need to get as many developers on board the MacIntel train as they can before it leaves the PPC station for good. People writing kernel extensions for currently unsupported hardware is a good thing, theyâ€™ll slam the door shut, hard, when it comes to products which they can sell.

They really donâ€™t have a choice when we consider that Apple can’t afford to lose hardware sales, even if they were to legally sell boxed versions of OS X for Intel processors, it’s questionable that they’d sell enough software to offset the loss of their healthy hardware margins.