PCA Forums

Does this mean us PC doods will be able to use a stable OS like OSX? oh my.....

if you look far enough ahead...if this would happen apple may do better sticking with OS development, like microsoft, and ditching hardware entirely. will be very interesting to see what happens!

It has happened. Officially announced today by Steve Jobs. I know I can't wait for an OSX that might hopefully support more stuff than the current OSX.

And the heads of millions of Macolytes 'round the world exploded at once.

on one hand, I can see why they did this. PowerPC advancement is too erratic. I think Jobs must have seen another G4 debacle looming (thinking back to the time that the G4 was stuck at 500 MHz for over a year.) IBM has the CPU in all three next-generation game consoles, Apple is small potatoes to them now.

Plus, I know quite a few people excited at the prospects of Mac OS X on a Pentium M laptop. The G4 is old and lagging way behind in performance, and there was no way in hell they could get the G5 in a laptop.

The big downside for me is that the resale value of my dual G5 just took a dump

If a new Mac is then basically a regular Intel based PC under the hood with OSX (in itself not a costly OS), what then justifies Macs high prices (which to me aren't justifiable in the first place)?

...and yes, I even have an older G4 now running OSX Tiger although I rarely use it (no real need).

Windows and Stability ....Win XP isn't stable? Tell that to my now 3 XP PCs w/o any stability issues, not including all those at work (several).

The new Intel based Macs aren't available yet so the current H/W will keep the same prices. I think full conversion will be completed in 2007.

If a new Mac is then basically a regular Intel based PC under the hood with OSX (in itself not a costly OS), what then justifies Macs high prices (which to me aren't justifiable in the first place)?

As far as I've read, these will use Intel CPUs and chipsets, but will still be unique designs. Legacy equipment will be gone, as will the AT BIOS. Speculation has it that these Intel Macs will be the first big push for EFI in place of the old BIOS.

Originally posted by Jim Z
As far as I've read, these will use Intel CPUs and chipsets, but will still be unique designs. Legacy equipment will be gone, as will the AT BIOS. Speculation has it that these Intel Macs will be the first big push for EFI in place of the old BIOS.

At least now you'll be able to possibly run windows on a mac using something like vmware to emulate the bios. I don't know why you'd want to do that but its possible.

I've heard that there was a program that switch Macs to run Windows several years ago, a guy at work knew a Mac user that had it. Could probably do a google search and find it but.........

I've heard that there was a program that switch Macs to run Windows several years ago, a guy at work knew a Mac user that had it. Could probably do a google search and find it but.........

Virtual PC (originally by Connectix, now owned by Microsoft) will let you run almost any x86 OS inside Mac OS. You can't boot Windows on a Mac, however.

There used to be builds of Windows NT for PowerPC systems, but they only ran on CHRP/PReP-compliant systems. It never ran on Apple systems. MS dropped the PowerPC build with NT 4.0 SP3.