Apple pulls OS X guidelines after developer protest | The Register __ I ran into this old article dated 2001. Most people have forgottent his episode in Apple history. But did it portend the switch to Windows? You tell me.
“Exploiting all the features of C+ in your code can make porting your software to new platforms and new compilers difficult.” Apple also suggests “C+” is not particularly portable, a claim hotly disputed on the developer lists.
Ironically the original, post-NeXT acquisition developer roadmapmaintained Windows portability in the form of the Yellow Box APIs, which as Apple explained let you run code on “Rhapsody for Intel, Windows 95, and Windows NT.” In its day, this technology (NeXTStep/OPENSTEP) was supported by Sun, HP and DEC too. But after taking the reins at Apple, Jobs ensure applications written for the APIs would remain on Mac hardware.
This may have foretold a lot only nobody was thinking in terms of an eventual switch to Intel and Windows, so it was mostly forgotten.
I need to relate a story here to give people a sense of how things move slower than we think. Some years back I was on an airplane sitting next to some Apple executive who was doing a memo about Apple setting up shop in Asia to do its manufacturing there. He had everything outlined carefully. I read what I could and then ran an article in the SF Examiner about the Apple plans. In fact it took close to three years before the plan actually went into effect. Big thinkers, I’ve determined over the years, are generally long-term thinkers. So all the speculation about Widows and the Mac may not be fully executied for very long time and nothing users should be freaked out about.
Meanwhile, you do want to read todays online column in PC Magazine
John – You read an Apple memo over somone’s shoulders on an airplane? I am never sitting next to you on an airplane. 🙂
Much more plausable that the information was towards a migration from RISC to CISC processors for the Mac… which is what just happened.
Change the word “Windows” to “x86” and the story makes a lot more sense.
Also, regarding today’s PCMag column, they accidently put a 7 in the date. You might want to have them take it out.
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Everything in your new column makes sense… expect the open source part. Apple abandoning control of their OS, even if they were to promote a Windows move (which I don’t buy in to), means they’d position the Mac platform to be sold only on the strength of the hardware. While the hardware is great, it doesn’t give them an advantage over the Dell’s of the world (and their dirt cheap boxes).
I still think that the opposite is the actual plan: OSX will continue becoming stronger, with Windows being treated as ‘legacy’, hence the ‘legacy support’ via dual-boot or virtualization.
I’ve been thinking about the possibility of Aplle supporting OSX on regular Intel boxes, and I predict that it will happen. Apple hardware may be pricy, but if OSX were to become a more common OS by running on beige-boxes, sales of Apple hardware would actually increase, because the number of people using OSX would increase, and many many people would pay for premium hardwar, and hardware that runs OSX better than ‘regular’ hardware.
Aside from some of the internal hardware on some systems, such as video-cards, networking and internal drive controllers, there is little new needed to run OSX on an Intel box as-is right now. Video cards are a biggie, but a huge majority of PC’s run on built-in generic video cards, so adding that support wouldn’t be tough. Everything that connects externally is USB, so if there is a program now for OSX, it doesn’t need a new program to run on a beige-box OSX system. Transition is fairly easy.
So John, you are wrong… Windows programs are being treated as legacy software by Apple, with the idea that people will eventually use them less and less, and migrate to OSX.
I don’t think that we will see Windows virtualization from Apple itself, because it makes using Windows programs too easy. By requiring dual-boot, Apple provides for Windows programs, but does not make it too easy. Apple must be very careful not to make it too easy to run Windows, because if they do, writting software for OSX will be less and less important, with Windows getting 100% of the software development, and OSX becoming nothing but a shell for Windows apps.
Your not thinking far enough into the future. Apple will be running on a new kernel with 10.5 running windows in visualization and native support for linux apps. 10.6 will see any windows app running natively on os x.
Visualization? Is that like virtualization, but only in the GUI?