On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Eric Smith wrote:
Jules wrote:
Has there been any word from Apple employees
about feelings within the
company about this?
Yes. The ones that are being laid off as a result of this are rather
unhappy. This includes ASIC designers, sustaining engineers, and
various others.
I don't understand the people that are bitching about Apple giving up
the "secret sauce" that makes the Mac unique. The secret sauce is
MacOS, and they're not giving that up. To a normal user, the brand
name of the CPU inside the box makes no difference.
What amazes me is that Apple didn't figure this out and switch a lot
sooner.
My question is: Given the ability of upcoming Intel (and AMD) CPUs to
self-virtualize seamlessly, how long will it take for someone to hack up a
"preboot" supervisor layer which will support OS X on a garden-variety PC?
They would almost have to resort to hardware-based DRM voodoo to prevent
it.
Steve