Speaking of Mac or Windows, how about Mac on Windows?

[Sieg9986]

OSX Emulation on x-86 achieved?

So says this thread in neowin.net

http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=19851&category=main

Here's the gist: It's slow, but it runs. It will run on your pc, but about 500 times slower than the native operating system you currently have installed, so those with 1 GHz and lower speed CPUs can expect around 2 Mhz operating speed : \

Which means, stick to just trying them out in the local computer store, don't waste your time on this yet. The project is promising, however it is still very alpha at a v. 0.1 release. Expect more to come from this in the coming months.

[shooraijin]

Very interesting. Actually, I'd like to run that on a Mac so that I can test stuff out without toasting my local install, or better still, coax it to run OS 9 so that apps that dislike Classic in OS X will run (right now I use a Power Mac 7100 with a G3/233 *winks to OldPhil* for this purpose).

There is a Mac-on-Linux that can run PPC Mac apps on a PPC Linux system, but I'm not particularly interested in Linux (I strongly prefer NetBSD).

Much more promising is Windows on Mac -- I use Virtual PC and can run Windows 98, Windows 2000, XP and Red Hat Linux all simultaneously and side-by-side. This dual 1.25GHz G4 benches out to a generic "686" at 667MHz, which isn't too bad for a rank emulator. Since Microsoft now owns Virtual PC and develops it, its Windows performance will likely improve exponentially as more Windows hooks are developed to allow more code to run natively on the PPC rather than through emulation. (On the other hand, this probably spells the end of anything other than Windows running on it, so I've stuck with the last Connectix version.)

EDIT: By "benching out" I mean that when I run a Windows benchmark in the emulated PC, that's the number I get, more or less -- that's not the benchmark for the raw G4 CPU itself.

[Sieg9986]

oh yeah, of course not for the raw G4 CPU, a dual 1.25 GHz CPU on a mac is astoundingly fast, especially with Altivec support in the applications that really eat up the resources.

As far as Microsoft buying out Connectix, that saddens me...I loved Connectix, they made the best ps1 emulator and a really good PC emulator, and they had good support for mac hardware with their pc hardware emulation. >.< Then Microsoft had to come in and buy it away from them : P bad microsoft

About this project, I really would like to get to the point where OS X doesn't need emulation but can be dual booted on an x-86 machine.

[shooraijin]

A lot of people have pushed Apple to make an Intel version of OS X, and Apple consistently refuses to do it (although Darwin/i386 is out there, and that's the kernel portion -- Apple just won't port the rest, like Aqua and Quartz).

Apple's reasoning is pure business, naturally, but not ill-conceived. A lot of people objected to Steve Jobs killing the clones when he took Apple back over, but the idea was sound economically because the clones were killing Apple. It was too late for the Macintosh to increase its market share significantly because by this time (the mid 1990s) Windows and DOS had already attained majority share. What the clones were doing was not increasing the market share of MacOS, but instead taking pieces of a market that wasn't getting any bigger -- i.e., taking business away from Apple instead of attracting people new to Macs in general. Jobs killed the clones to save Apple, or else they would have drained the parent dry.

An analogous situation is here -- there's no advantage to Apple making an x86 OS X, and lots to lose. What they would be doing is creating an army of cheap PCs that could run MacOS, which would kill any reason to buy a Mac, but at the same time, there would be very few people who would migrate to the new platform, meaning the operating system too would fail.

Apple may only have 3-6% of the market depending on who you talk to, but it's a 3-6% of the market that's fiercely loyal and is willing to pay a premium for a Mac. (Heck, I dropped $3300 on this system when it was new. It cost more than my first car.) That's why they're still so profitable, and things like the iPod are icing. They'd never dare jeopardize it with a version of OS X you could run on a PC.

But Darwin is a nice OS, if you're bored with Linux.

[Fsiphskilm]

EWWWW... the

[Mithrandir]

Heh. I remember that box... *winks at shooby* There are other alternatives to Virtual PC, but none of them are any good (as far as I can tell). What really irritates me is this:

1. Microsoft Bought Virtual PC.
2. They then released a new version that ran on everything EXCEPT the newest hardware. VPC won't run on a G5 yet, and it's really annoying. If I could get it to, then I could acutally get rid of ALL my windows boxes, and be happy. But NOOOO. M$ won't do it. Combine that with the fact that they bought connectix out and squashed the PSI/PSII emulator market (in direct competition with their Xbox), and I really don't like this purchase (from a personal standpoint). I strongly suspec that the reason VPC doesn't run on a mac is to keep some people from buying a G5, thus hurting Apple sales.

But I don't have any proof of that...

[shooraijin]

Well, the other reason is that the G5 is missing the endian-muxing hardware that the G3 and G4 have, which isn't Microsoft's fault. The Connectix VPC won't run on the G5 either for the same reason, since the emulation core depends heavily on the fact that the G3 and G4 can take data in little-endian *and* big-endian mode, and work natively with both with no performance penalty. The G5 is little-endian, period.

What *is* Microsoft's fault is dragging their heels on releasing a G5-capable VPC. That *does* stink.

[Sieg9986]

I personally think Apple is spreading itself too thin these days. It's trying to be a successful company while producing software that only works on it's hardware, with the exception of a few iApps that do (iTunes and Quicktime which are free anyways -_-) .

Unless you own a system with a little leeway as far as upgrading goes *IE the G4 and G5 with their upgradability features* you're pretty much forced to buy a new mac every few years, and even then with the upgrading, some things can't be upgraded and will eventually become obsolete. I really believe that releasing an OS that runs on Intel and AMD hardware would help the company gain some ground. OS X is beautiful, that's a given, just take a look at it, it's way pretier than Windows XP as far as both GUI and animations go. Who wouldn't love to boot up a shiney, smooth, fast, simple, and intelligent operating system like OS X? Better yet, on their obviously faster existing PC hardware. OS X is also pretty secure and in my experience well developed as far as networking with other computers (mac or windows). Also, with work, any of the games currently out could run on a Mac OS. As well as OS X manages it's resources, I'd say the operating system could make a fine gaming machine.

Also lets face it, Apple is losing ground in the artistic and creative industries. Pretty much anything that can be done on a mac can be done also on a PC. Apple's apparently got Adobe **** at it, It's video hardware is a little lacking as far as 3d modeling goes and one of the most popular 3d modeling tools out there, 3ds Max, isn't for mac. I use Maya, and while that is cross platform, Maya runs better on the PC in my experience. It was designed with 3 button mice users in mind anyways.

Apple has a hard enough time keeping up with the other side of the market. Their new G5, the only one even comparable to the current PC benchmarking leaders, still falls in short. It's no longer the only 64 bit desktop processor on the market since AMD released their Athlon 64 chip line.

So I say Apple should release a "PC" version of it's OS. If they want to continue making their own machines, let them, I think it'd be nice if they found a niche in the creative industries by making custom machines built for specific purposes (IE Music, Video production, 3d modeling, CAD, etc.)

P.S. Apple is good at music and HD/DV video production though.

[Fsiphskilm]

[quote="O

[shooraijin]

> Also lets face it, Apple is losing ground in the artistic and creative industries.

This is sort of "in the eye of the behoulder" thing. Even though Adobe and Apple haven't been getting along after the Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere incident, it would be a cold day in you-know-where before Photoshop or Illustrator ever left the Mac. Moreover, Apple now owns a lot of the big names in high-end rendering and media, including Shake (which was used in the Lord of the Rings movies) and Logic, and these are so entrenched that they're basically money machines without Apple even having to touch them. Naturally, the Mac versions are being pushed, and used. What's more, Avid, the market leader in non-linear editing technology, is now releasing Mac versions of their software and hardware, including the very attractively priced Avid Express.

PCs do have the same problem w/r/t upgradability, you realise -- you're having to get a new motherboard every so often, too, which is pretty much what you're doing when you buy a new Mac (except you get the new CPU, new hardware, and so on). This (2003 model) Mac has a Pioneer DVD-R/CD-RW burner, a Radeon AGP4x, PC2700 DDR SDRAM, an off-the-shelf SCSI card, ATA/100 drives ... pretty much everything's the same as a desktop PC, except the CPU, the design and the support chipset.

The G5 is not a frozen chip, too. First of all, its FSB is faster than the Pentium 4's current offering (1GHz versus 800MHz), and estimates on the next generation of the G5 place it at the 2.5 to 3.0GHz mark *in a smaller 90 nanometer process die* for a chip that clock-for-clock is already doing more with a clock tick than the CISC P4 (remember that AMD suffers the same PR problem; they tend to have chips with lower clockspeeds that still bench out faster than P4s that have higher clocks, but people only pay attention to the *-hertz rating). Moreover, the soon-to-be-released 2.5GHz 970FX G5's power dissipation is a miniscule 25W (Prescott winds up at a boiling 90W), meaning the clock can ramp up higher and higher before power and heat become a concern, *and* since IBM's silicon-on-insulator technology has less of a penalty in power use for increasing clock, the potential yields in speed would get proportionately higher.

In any case, consider these benchmarks: http://www.titleofsite.com/archives/000042.html

Regardless, back to OS X. The point is, OS X *can't* gain enough ground against Windows to make it profitable to junk selling Macs (which is what a PC OS X would do -- cause it to be impossible for Apple to sell Macintoshes). Look at what happened to Be and NeXT's market presence, both of whom tried to do the same kind of jump. Leaping to Intel didn't help them at all.

[Sieg9986]

It is true Apple will never really be pushed out of the creative market, as it will always have as much access to high end applications such as Photoshop, ImageReady, Illustrator, Maya, Combustion, Flash, Dreamweaver (and the rest of the Macromedia suite), etc...however, more and more people are realizing that PCs aren't the *crash every 5 minutes hunks of junk* they used to be. They are reliable, in some cases they can be faster by a small margin than their Apple counterparts, and they are often much cheaper. Therefore, since they also have a much wider user base and the same access to high end applications that the mac has (and much more) there is no longer any reason why PCs shouldn't be in the creative market.

About the benchmarking thing, the only news I have heard on benchmarking speeds was an article I read about 2 or 3 months ago in a magazine pitting two of the top-configured PCs on the market from AMD and Intel against the best G5 available. I was disheartened to see the G5 fall in 3rd place, however it wasn't a hard fall, as it's benchmarks were less by a small margin.

As for the Apple vs Microsoft spiel, both companies in the past, have had long and ugly paths leading to where they are today. However, Microsoft and Apple are now both producing quality products that really are worth every penny (be the technology stolen or not, in this industry, everyone steals... it's just a matter of who can make it look/work better) In any case, I didn't start this thread to make it a long battle over which is better...It was merely speculation into what it would be like to emulate the mac os or run it natively on pc hardware.

Yes, I know it will probably never happen.

Honestly, the only reason I hope it will is because I'd like to see Apple catch up in the only area that it is lacking in, gaming. That there is the reason I put all my extra money towards my PC instead of into a G5 fund.