WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

I like the look of the new Mac OSX and would be tempted to ‘Switch’ if only I didn’t have to shell out for another whole PC. If I could run it on my Asus / AMD / nVidia machine I reckon I’d switch soon. ( Except for the fact I have just bought Oblivion and it doesn’t run on OSX … yet ). I like the idea of virtualization, though. If that becomes stable enough and fast enough ( near native speed ) OSX becomes even more tempting.
I have a theory though. I think Apple are testing the water at this stage and that’s why they have ‘locked down’ their system to Intel / ATI. It gives them a stable system with known specifications to run their OS. If you know what CPU, chipset, graphics card, etc your OS is running on you have two benefits: 1. You only need one set of drivers. 2. You don’t have to convince others to write drivers and hence don’t have people complaining about their hardware not working with your OS.
Microsoft have often said the main reason for most crashing and blue screens can be traced back to dodgy drivers. With OSX on known hardware you can concentrate on building a stable OS for now which also convinces people to ’switch’. Once you have a good, stable OS you can move onto providing drivers for other hardware devices and increasing your support for them, giving you a wider range.
I expect OSX to eventually support nVidia cards, other soundcards and other hardware in the future, but for now concentrating on providing a popular alternative to XP on a stable platform.
This is also why you can’t yet buy OSX ‘off the shelf’. Apple knows you would run it on hardware not in their official HCL, then they have a support nightmare. Especially with OSX in such early days on the Intel platform.
In the meantime, other programmers will work on writing drivers to get OSX running on their unsupported hardware. Apple can keep an eye on this to see how well it works and later unveil OSX for other platforms and hardware configurations.
Meanwhile the rest of us will keep an eye on Parallel, Q, VMware and Boot Camp to run those few required applications on XP when we have to. Until OSX gets greater market share, of course. Then companies will be more likely to program OSX native versions of their applications.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 11:03 am and is filed under Blogmail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.