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February 18, 2006
Heh, Apple Inside...
Speculation has been going on for years as to when, not if, you might be able to run Macintosh OS on Intel machines. Years of Bigfoot reports of sighting, Intel boxes already running Mac OSX kept in locked rooms on the Apple campus. All good fun of course. Of course. Most recently this has taken the turn of how Apple will try, and eventually fail, to prevent purchasers of their new Intel Macs from running Windows on those machines, typically a dual-boot daydream.
But Big Brother Steve-o apparently is not a dream maker this week.
This week Apple shut down numerous web sites that contained information on how to get Mac OSX running on non-Apple Intel Boxes. Yeah, you want a 3GHZ machine with all the hot goodness that comes on low-priced WinTel machines? Would that hurt the Apple bottom line? Would we see $120 Apple OSX Retail boxes just disappear from the shelves? Would we have a grin on our faces that even a Dick Cheney puppy-killing couldn't wipe off?
However, it's no slam-dunk. Make no mistake about it - Apple is a hardware manufacturer. Software drives hardware sales for them - and they want to keep it that way. So when hackers figured out that they can run Mac OSX on cheaper boxes, that's like you figuring out how to steal cable from your neighbor wirelessly - kind of destroys their business model. They lose the t-shirt and jeans "I do all this cool stuff just because I love you" air of Mr. Jobs, and invoke the most heinous Digital Millennium Copyright Act to cut off the ingenious folks oxygen supply. But we expected nothing less. Steve is very smart, but he's really no different from any CEO who is trying to make stockholders - not users - very happy.
All of a sudden, it's a lot more like 1984. And big brother wears granny glasses to read.
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