OT: Run Mac OSX Leopard on your PC!

riredale wrote on 11/2/2007, 3:04 PM
Apparently true. I saw this article earlier today, and apparently someone has found out how to make it run on the regular x86 PC platform. Maybe we will now have yet another option besides Vista, XP, and Gutsy Gibbon!

I've never used the recent Mac OS's but many people say they are friendly, stable, and relatively crash-free. Not much of a fan of Mr. Jobs these days, but one can't deny that he has been remarkably successful over the years.

Comments

CorTed wrote on 11/2/2007, 3:14 PM
I'm having a hard enough time trying to get Vista to work properly on my PC. Can you imagine the driver problems etc. with this kind of set up?

Ted
farss wrote on 11/2/2007, 5:52 PM
Apart from the technical challenges it's illegal. Apple's EULAs have always precluded you running their OSs on anything other than their hardware. When you buy a Mac it comes with a licence for the OS that cannot be transferred. All new OSs are updates to that licence.

Apple don't just stop you from running their OSs on other hardware, over the years they've even gone out of their way to stop you upgrading their hardware. When they first bought out their 68000 based computers several of the guys I worked with decided to upgrade theirs by replacing the CPU with the faster 68010. It's a pin for pin replacement and the intruction set is identical. Except the dang things wouldn't run!
Fortunately we had a Motorola hardware emulator and were able to find out why. There was a very small bug in the 68000's uCode that meant one instruction that should have caused a supervisor exception didn't. Apple had a few line of code in their BIOS that'd cause the system to crash if that instruction excecuted correctly. We were able to copy the BIOS, patch it and burn new EPROMs and the computers worked faster and flawlessly. Needless to say what we did was technically illegal according to Apple.

Bob.
AtomicGreymon wrote on 11/2/2007, 6:25 PM
Apart from the technical challenges it's illegal. Apple's EULAs have always precluded you running their OSs on anything other than their hardware. When you buy a Mac it comes with a licence for the OS that cannot be transferred. All new OSs are updates to that licence.

And it's this, combined with their laughably unjustifiable prices, that keeps me from going MAC whenever I do consider it every few years. It makes you wonder why governments have bothered going after MS for something as petty as including IE in their OS when Apple engages in much more legally questionable, restrictive, and monopolistic practices. They need to be taken down a peg, if you ask me.

Personally, I like being able to read reviews of such a wide assortment of video cards, sound cards, DVD burners, processors and so on and being able to swap them out with ease. And I wouldn't trade that freedom for OSX. A well put-together custom build PC with XP Pro will give as good performance as a MAC for pretty much any application, IMO.
Chienworks wrote on 11/2/2007, 7:25 PM
The difference is that Apple doesn't have a majority market share, not even close by a long long shot. Microsoft does. That makes all the difference in the DOJ's eyes.