Macs and Intel

I’m gonna geek out a little here because it’s been awhile. Don’t worry though, I am going to smoke while I write this and poor a little bourbon into my coffee. Yes, I know I’m in a cubicle and can’t do any of that, but it’s the internet and you can’t see what I’m doing.

boolean is actually listening to his iPod and drinking coffee

The big news in the Apple world this week exploded out of the WWDC in San Francisco on Monday when His Stevosity announced Apple would move Mac OS X to the Intel x86 platform. I stayed quiet over the weekend as the rumour became substantiated and others worked themselves into a lather denying the plausibility of the situation. Others vociferously announced that Apple was finally admitting that all its marketing was bullshit and that the PC camp that have poo-pooed the Macs as slower-than-hell were right and Apple fags could go to hell…

Well, it’s true. Apple is moving to IA-32 x86 hardware. Pentiums, in fact.

While the initial horror has melted into a kind of somnolent verisimilitude, it has left a residual, bitter aftertaste. The move to Intel eliminates the distance to the Wintel PC. Apple-branded hardware will no doubt include some form of special onboard chipness, but that has yet-to-be revealed. OpenFirmware has been confirmed to absent from the platform and will be replaced by the more familiar and significantly more ghetto BIOS (brand not yet confirmed). That will bring the PowerMac very close to the traditional PC indeed.

This has many people speculating that Apple is about to embark on the exciting adventure of Operating System Piracy. No doubt, Apple is planning on preventing this with hardware. That special chip I mentioned up above is likely going to take the form of a hardware dongle that will allow their operating system to actually operate. But PC hackers are enthusiastic and extremely persistent. The Xbox has a sort of hardware dongle that was supposed to prevent people from modifying their hardware and not running copied games. Didn’t work. It was bypassed in about a month. The DVD? It’s a secure format with hardware protection on the DVD player that allows it to play. DVD Jon cracked that badboy when some noob released an unencrypted key in their software. Or maybe it’s going to be some form of much-hyped, universally-feared DRM system on a chip. Call me naive, but I’m willing to bet someone, somewhere will eventually get around it.

So what can Apple do about this? They can open the OS up to all hardware, thereby killing their own business. As well-built and designed as their machines are, the average person will not pay a premium for computer hardware. I might because I’m Sick To Death of building PCs that struggle with heat and noise and am willing to pay someone to do the dirty work for me. Should I go to PCCyber and pay them to do it or should I pay Apple? I dunno. Depends on what they offer. What if I can get something different from what Apple provides at a similar price? Will I still pay the Apple tax?

Another possibility: Apple may get into the same arms-race as the satellite television people. You’re on a network? You’re using a pirated copy of OS X on an illegal machine? *zap* Your drive is wiped. This would be an entirely unpleasant eventuality. While I wouldn’t blame a software vendor for being pissed-off about pirated software, I’d also find it somewhat dictatorial if they started nuking machines. This is not without precedent. A shareware company whose name I forget did just that when detecting a pirated serial number on their software. Nasty stuff, but one of those things where you kind of think, hm, maybe they should have paid for the software or just not used it. I know, there are all kinds of arguments there, but that’s the point: it’s a messy situation. It is a situation where if Apple did something like that, their reputation would become worse than that of Microsoft which does, grudgingly put up with pirated copies of Windows and which has debated nuking them in the past, but can’t seem to come up with a politically safe way to do it.

Windows…

Yes, that other Operating System. There are some interesting possibilities for Windows users with the new Intel platform. I keep a PC in the house for playing games and running software that I just can’t get on the Mac. It’s unpleasant, but my machine is fast and hot and pretty quiet so I put up with it.

One of Microsoft’s products, Virtual PC has been running on the PowerPC platform for years and allows a Mac user to have an installation of Windows running within OS X. Now that the platforms are going to be the same, it should be very possible to run Windows in an environment at near-native speeds. Even better, Linux in a window. Or multiple simultaneous systems. Of course, the opposite is also a possibility. Microsoft has just announced that they are going to include a virtualization layer within Longhorn for running embedded OSes within Windows. Maybe they’re planning on running OS X in a window?

And it doesn’t stop there. Rosetta, the technology that is making it possible to run PowerPC code on the Intel-based Macs may well make it possible to emulate (or “Translate” as they’re spinning it) operating systems running on different hardware.

The mind boggles…

So, can we expect far greater interoperability? I think that’s a very safe bet. Can I run Guild Wars in a window inside VirtualPC on an Intel-Mac? Gosh, maybe? Of course, there are technical reasons for why this could be dangerous and undesirable. If you give your Windows low-level access to your hardware, you lose all semblance of security.

Which brings us back around to DRM. I fully-expect to see some requirement for DRM and signed code on these machines. It’s distasteful, but I really don’t see how else they can plan on preventing users on pirating the OS and running it anywhere, provided they have hardware that is supported in it. Intel has actually been somewhat terse in their insistence that the Pentium-D has no hidden DRM features built-in (but that it supports a whole host of broadcast and content piracy prevention standards, but you want those, don’t you?). So are they going to use some off-die DRM system? Will that be slower than having it on-chip where you have the benefit of fast caches and aren’t limited by the system bus for shuttling data to and from memory?

Apple software is already pirated. I can download a torrent of DVDStudioPro right now, but I find that distasteful in the extreme. Unfortunately, the masses have no similar restraint. If OS X becomes heavily pirated and kludged to run on plain-ol, PCs (PoPC platform), how long before virus-writers get down to writing killer software for that platform? Yes, the OS is more secure, in-general than Windows, but there are still holes and a dedicated, willing black-hat hacker can write nasty software for the Mac just as easily as he can for Windows. Until now though, the price-of-admission was a big turn-off for these under-employed, ne’er-do-wells.

Overall, is good for Apple? Yes and no. I think the potential for disaster is huge. It’ll just take one bad security breach from a pirated OS to make the headlines and then we’re right back in the same puddle I tried to get out of: the puddle of buggy, insecure operating system running on crap hardware. I really hope it goes the other way: a luxurious pool of nice, secure operating system on well-designed, well-built hardware.

PS, AAPL’s up so far today. Feel free to trade stocks right now as there’s money to be made in all the speculation.