Fergie's Tech Blog

Bag open, cat gone: Mac OS X running on x86

John Murrell writes over on Good Morning, Silicon Valley:

Many would say it was bound to happen. Apple's impending move to Intel chips naturally sparked efforts to see if Mac OS X could be made to run on off-the-shelf x86 equipment despite whatever technical hurdles Apple threw in the way. This week, those efforts appear to have succeeded. A tweaked version of the Intel-flavored Mac OS -- one that bypasses a chip, the Trusted Platform Module, that is intended to prevent the system from running on ordinary PCs -- is out in the wild and has been seen running both natively on PCs and with the help of VMware's virtualization software. Not only that, but it appears to be running faster than the Mac OS does on today's Macs.

Bound to happen, right? Or was it meant to happen? PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak sees a brilliant PR scheme at work that would allow Steve Jobs to grudgingly trot out an unrestricted version of OS X because The People have demanded it. This is what Dvorak wrote four days ago: "Here is how this scenario plays out. Apple plays the game with some sort of trusted-computing lockdown. The source code for the exact mechanism is stolen or hacked or both. It's actually weak and meant to be cracked. Soon the crack is on the Net, and with or without a hardware bypass, the code is shown working on a Dell. Apple protests and threatens to sue anyone caught running the code. This results in all sorts of publicity, as the average user wants to know what all the fuss is about." And here we are.

posted by Fergie @ 8/12/2005 10:47:00 AM