Apple moving away from OpenFirmware

[srg]

Hi

Well, this is a turn up for the books.

Apple are moving away from PowerPC, to the x86, more specifically at the moment, the Pentium 4 and Pentium m (as an AMD person it does make me kind of mad but oh well).

What's also interesting is that their not using OpenFirmware in their x86 Macs.

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2439

I wonder if these will be PC compatibles, with a BIOS, or something complely different.

It seems odd to me, why not just change the CPU and rewrite the Openfirmware?

srg

P.S. I'm guessing this will be a blow for people who want the "Antiquated" x86 architechture to go away.

[Solar]

Still having my roots in the Amiga community, I can say it's certainly a blow to their dreams of making it back on stage with the AmigaOne or Pegasos (both PPC based, which seems like another dead end to me as the market for Desktop PPC's just died).

However some of that community still don't realize that. Then again, to be still "actively dreaming" in that direction probably requires some "not realizing"...

[Brendan]

Hi,

I wonder if these will be PC compatibles, with a BIOS, or something complely different.

From what I hear the hardware will be standard PCs (possibly with some minor Apple tweaks), that will be able to run Windows and my OS . The reverse won't be true though - OS X 10.5 won't run on normal no-brand x86 computers. I figure this has more to do with device drivers, marketting and the common sense to avoid direct competition with Microsoft than anything else.

There's currently a large flock of rumors too - see the public comments on the related articles at http://osnews.com/...


Cheers,

Brendan

[Therx]

Seems to me like Apple are shooting themselves in the foot. Much of their advantage is the stylish casing. So if its now going to be possible to use the casing with windows, I suspect that sales of OS X are going to slump.

Although I suppose that you still have to buy the Mac in the first place which will come with OS X - unless the fair trade courts do the same as with MS and make it so that people should be able to chose the OS...

Surely its just making Apple into Yet Another PC Manufacturer

Hmm...

Pete

[Pype.Clicker]

Seems to me like Apple are shooting themselves in the foot. Much of their advantage is the stylish casing. So if its now going to be possible to use the casing with windows, I suspect that sales of OS X are going to slump.

uh ?? Why would people put Windows on their Apple PC if they can have MacOSX on it ? That'd be like buying a ferrari and then replace the motor by boosted VW or something ...

Sorry, but i just don't see the advantage one could get with that move. Maybe that's because i suppose Apple PC will not be sold without MacOS, btw.

[AR]

Maybe so you can dual boot to play Windows games... Or other useful software packages that are only available on Windows. If the Mac x86 does run Mac OS X then even Mac software won't work anyway as it will need to be recompiled for the target (but if the APIs are the same then that shouldn't be difficult seeing as they use GCC anyway).