PC and Apple hardware are formatted differently. Apparently you CAN put OS X on there, but you come out of it with more problems than you anticipated.
Also, it's my understanding that boot camp is pretty much a dual boot. You have to log out of osx and reboot into windows. I have VMWare Fusion running XP on my macbook, it's virtualization, but still has an allocation of the disk.
I think being able to run both on the same machine will draw a lot of people to OSX, because it's much harder to do it the other way around. No longer is there the issue of "I can't get a macbook because I have all windows software and I don't want to rebuy it all".
Another draw I've noticed is that Mac owners seem very drawn to freeware (probably since we paid dearly for our hardware), and thus anything you can do on windows has a matching freeware app you can find for macs. Just my opinon though. Most of that is on windows too, but you start to look for it more with a mac. Who needs adobe when you can install gimpshop?
I don't know enough to say, but it seems like with Apple using Intel it can't be a huge difference. I don't think the processors or motherboards are the *exact* same as in PCs, but it seems like something a driver could fix. And I'm pretty sure that the RAM, optical drives, hard drives, etc. are identical. Since Windows seems to run on Mac hardware without too much trouble, it would seem to support the idea that the hardware is mostly similar
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There was an article on like "Switching to Macs" (it's a blog, but not really an overly Mac biased one) that had the cost breakdown to try and get the hardware that macs come standard with in a PC. Basically, they came to the conclusion that macs are not overpriced and are often under the price of a PC. Problem being that a lot of the standard stuff on a mac folks like parents wouldn't necessarily need/want
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If I knew that OS X would work on a PC I'd jump on that, but I'm pretty sure it's not that easy at the moment.
I'm certain a Mac is more feature rich than my ~$600 Dell, but like you said, most people don't care. When it's just "that thing that takes me to the Internet" no one really needs fancy hardware. Yet OS X would be a lot more friendly to that crowd than Windows.
A generation raised on iPods certainly will be friendly to Macs. It just seems like they could do more to push the issue. I mean, 10 years from now it might all be a moot point. Everything will be written in some cross platform language (Java except better?) so that your system won't matter. Or it'll all be web based, whatever that will mean in 10 years.
The official Apple line for years, and still used, is that Apple started as a hardware company, and is still a hardware company. They would rather use OS-X to sell hardware than vice-versa. And for now, it certainly looks like it's working for them. Take Michael Dell's famous quote from a few years ago when someone asked what he would do as CEO of Apple, which was to dissolve the company and give all the money back to the shareholders. Today, Apple's market capitalization has sky-rocketed past Dell's, which has remained pretty well base-lined. They are making money hand over fist, which is what ultimately matters, as opposed to market share
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Maybe a good analogy would be exclusive games. Say Xbox has Halo and Playstation has Gran Turismo. There's no reason why they can't make Halo for the Playstation. And I hate to buy new hardware just to play a game. And while I may think that expanding the market for Halo to Playstation would be a good idea... they don't care about selling Halo. They want to sell the Xbox
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As far I know (and I did look into this a while back) all that's needed to make OS X run on commodity x86 hardware is having a hacked install disk and compatible hardware. When people first started doing this, they were all buying specific Intel Mobos and CPU's etc to match mac hardware. It looks like these days you can get it working on a much greater variety of hardware. Check out the OSx86 wiki for more info (specifically the Hardware Compatibility Lists and 3rd Party Drivers List). Pre-hacked install discs are probably available from the usual places
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Wow, that's amazing. I should have taken the time to look that up. And they even have it running on AMD, which seems like it would be a lot more complicated. It definitely seems to imply that Apple could do the same thing themselves without much trouble.
The iPhone is really neat. I wasn't in the market for a phone but I considered the iTouch. I just didn't really need all the extras for something I just wanted to play music. Apple has me sold on most of their ideas though. iTunes is great, even if if feels a little slow and bloated. And coverflow really hasn't been useful beyond looking nice.
I do normally. But my old computer sort of died on me, and it would take me a month to research parts to build a new one. So the lure of a cheap pre-made PC got to me.
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Also, it's my understanding that boot camp is pretty much a dual boot. You have to log out of osx and reboot into windows. I have VMWare Fusion running XP on my macbook, it's virtualization, but still has an allocation of the disk.
I think being able to run both on the same machine will draw a lot of people to OSX, because it's much harder to do it the other way around. No longer is there the issue of "I can't get a macbook because I have all windows software and I don't want to rebuy it all".
Another draw I've noticed is that Mac owners seem very drawn to freeware (probably since we paid dearly for our hardware), and thus anything you can do on windows has a matching freeware app you can find for macs. Just my opinon though. Most of that is on windows too, but you start to look for it more with a mac. Who needs adobe when you can install gimpshop?
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I'm certain a Mac is more feature rich than my ~$600 Dell, but like you said, most people don't care. When it's just "that thing that takes me to the Internet" no one really needs fancy hardware. Yet OS X would be a lot more friendly to that crowd than Windows.
A generation raised on iPods certainly will be friendly to Macs. It just seems like they could do more to push the issue. I mean, 10 years from now it might all be a moot point. Everything will be written in some cross platform language (Java except better?) so that your system won't matter. Or it'll all be web based, whatever that will mean in 10 years.
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The iPhone is really neat. I wasn't in the market for a phone but I considered the iTouch. I just didn't really need all the extras for something I just wanted to play music. Apple has me sold on most of their ideas though. iTunes is great, even if if feels a little slow and bloated. And coverflow really hasn't been useful beyond looking nice.
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