OSX running on a $300 PC....

[stiltman]

http://wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,68501,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Imagine if your next Mac cost you only $300, and ran faster than any G4 or G5 you've ever used.

That future may already be unfolding: Hackers have found a way to bypass a chip designed to prevent the Mac OS from running on non-Apple PCs, which are often cheaper than Macs.

Some of the hackers are running the tweaked version of the operating system on their PCs natively. Others are using the system with VMware, which allows the Mac OS to support more PC hardware.

[BJ_M]

i figured this would happen pretty quickly

[trossin]

This brings back memories of the early 1990's when my computer of choice was an Atari1040-ST computer. With the proper bootleg ROMs you could run the MacOS on the Atari machine. It was fun but that was about it. The amount of Mac software is limited and there are not as many folks developing code for it as for Windows and Linux.

Everyone loves to bitch about Microsoft but if you shell out $70 bucks for their compiler you get a great compiler development environment with tons and tons of documentation through the MSDN. It also exposes you to all the classes that they give away for free with Windows (DirectX, OpenGL, MFC ...). I posted a pointer to my web site with a tiny amount of code that allows you to play video in a window using the DirectShow subset of DirectX.

http://www.geocities.com/ted_rossin/tools/Video/Video.html

The deeper you dig the more you will be amazed. There are some really talented people working there (they went on a huge buying spree years ago during the dot-com bust and bought all the talent).

Back when I was younger and did X-Window GUI crap under HP Unix (3D graphics demos of hardware I helped design) I learned what a mess the folks at MIT made of implementing a windows interface. It took shit loads and shit loads of code to do anything useful. And that was using Motif which is a layer on top of shit loads of low level X code.

I know it is fun to bash Microsoft, but they really made it better for most of us by allowing us to buy cheap ass hardware and do video editing. Imagine what it would be like if we still had to buy Silicon Graphics (the brains behind Nvida) workstations to play with video.

The point I'm trying to make is that even if MacOS would run on your low priced high volume hardware what would be the advantage? Would you be willing to pay $100 for it then have to shell out extra money to buy basic applications? Or, would you just use the $30 OEM Windows or $15 magazine DVD Linux?

[yoda313]

I know it is fun to bash Microsoft, but they really made it better for most of us by allowing us to buy cheap ass hardware and do video editing. Imagine what it would be like if we still had to buy Silicon Graphics (the brains behind Nvida) workstations to play with video.

Ditto to that. I know ms has its problems but unification of hardware specs and software packages has made it so much easier to do computing. And its just nice to know things do work reasonably well. XP is a really nice OS.

[lenti_75]

if you could use any pc soft under mac, would be awsome, but this way is useless, to much money an less options to use with mac os.

[lumis]

how difficult would this be to install?

is hardware compatibility very low?

so if i were to know a friend who had this and he were to steal my computer and install it on it, chances are he wouldnt be able to get on the internet, listen to mp3's, burn dvd's, etc?

[stiltman]

how difficult would this be to install?

is hardware compatibility very low?

so if i were to know a friend who had this and he were to steal my computer and install it on it, chances are he wouldnt be able to get on the internet, listen to mp3's, burn dvd's, etc?

http://osx86project.org/

[BJ_M]

since there are next to no apps for mac ported over to x386 OS-X yet .. not a lot you can run except whats built into OS-X

but soon - think of running photoshop, shake, DVD Studio and FCP on your PC

[lordsmurf]

Man, that's a lot of stuff.

I wish Apple would just bundle it and sell it for like $200. Get it over with. It would be worth it simply to not have to screw around with all that other voodoo.

Let it dual boot with Windows, be a direct competitor of Microsoft, and live with humble pie that they did not own the world of computers. Talk about not being able to let go!

People do not like to be forced to buy everything together anymore. This is why they have so many computer stores selling so many individual pieces.

[lumis]

how difficult would this be to install?

is hardware compatibility very low?

so if i were to know a friend who had this and he were to steal my computer and install it on it, chances are he wouldnt be able to get on the internet, listen to mp3's, burn dvd's, etc?

http://osx86project.org/

i did a screencap with cpu-z.. so this computer would not be able to run OSx386, correct?

[stiltman]

Couldn't tell you. I'm not running it and I've really not read the FAQ or support forums.

[redwudz]

Looks like Prescott P4's and AMD's newer 64bit processors have SSE3 capability. My profiled A64 computer shows SSE2 capability with CPUZ. My other computers just show SSE. Looks interesting, though. I also have a G4 Mac with OSx.

[schunn99]

hey all,
I been reading on the osx86, some people have had sucess running cpu's that don't have sse3. like for example, look at the screenshots that are on the wired article about it. A hacker is running a pentium 4, which I think has only sse2. I saw a screenshot yesterday of someone running an athlon but not 64 bit.
later,
schunn99