Apple’s announcement that they were going to move to the x86 architecture was a bit surprising. The PPC platform has always functioned as a pedestal of sorts. It’s one of those things that doesn’t matter at all to Joe User, but Apple, and Apple fanboys, could cite it as a feature. Now that OSX is going to be running on x86 processors, they’ve lost that.
More importantly, they may just have lost the exclusivity of the PPC platform. If OSX is going to run on the same processors that run Windows, what is to prevent people from running OSX on generic hardware? Not much, as it turns out. To be sure, Apple’s early x86 development kits featured security to prevent that from happening. In a much-disputed move, they included Trusted Computing chips on their development hardware, and put code into OSX to require the TC chip. Trusted Computing is a topic all its own, but the short version is that it’s Big Brother inside your computer telling you what software can run with what hardware, what file formats you can use, and all that bad stuff. It’s such a horrible thought, that Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing contributer, and owner of an Apple tattoo on his right bicep, would consider Trusted Computing to be a deal-breaker if it were included in the final retail product. It is unknown whether or not Apple plans on including it when they launch.
Further complicating things, is the fact that some hackers have managed to remove the restriction requiring the Trusted Computing chip. Now people all over the place are running OSX on their Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 laptops. I’m loathe to say it, but John Dvorak may have been right. Apple would have been stupid not to have seen this coming. You can’t move OSX to the x86 platform and not expect that people are going to run it on generic hardware. Dvorak seems to think that this was their plan all along. Wouldn’t that be great? I’m betting that if Apple and Microsoft could compete head-to-head for PCs, that Apple would win, handily. More and more people are switching to Macs, and Windows XP is long in the tooth, with “Longhorn” or “Vista” nowhere in sight (and years behind OSX Tiger). Things could get really interesting.
Perhaps everyone is just being far too cynical about the x86 transfer and the use of ‘Trusted Computing’ chips. Perhaps Apple left off restrictions that prevent OSX’s transfer to Intel processors because they wanted everyone to see how well and how easily it could work. Perhaps they’re not going to be locking down large parts of the software range to computers that contain Trusted Computing chips. Perhaps Apple is simply reacting to moves by Big Media who are saying to Jobs and Co that they won’t release new movies and other media on formats that are not able to check the trustworthyness (whatever that means) of the computer that’s running the file. Perhaps Apple has had little choice. What Cory leaves out in his boingboing post is the fact that Apple aren’t forcing you to move your data around in any particular way and they’re not saying that you can’t move your data, but perhaps they’re just saying that if you’re running a newly downloaded movie from iTunes or iWhatever will come in the future, it has to be run on a ‘Trusted’ piece of hardware to run in a particular way. This doesn’t mean that all data will be subject to these rules or that we’ll be beholden to them throughout the life of using a product. It just means that if one author or publisher wants to be anal about the way they release their intellectual property, they can be. The reaction of the public shouldn’t be to not buy the technology running it at all, but to tell the publishers what a dumb idea it is to be so petty!But then I’m writing this on a Powerbook too, so I’m kind of hoping Apple will be ‘nice’ and not mess up here. TC in theory doesn’t seem like an awful idea to me, though some of its uses could be far less than agreeable.
I was very disappointed by the news that “Trustworthy Computing” technology would be used in the Intel-compatible OS X. TC is one of the main things that bothers me about Vista, and I had been considering a move to Mac as an alternative. Since the Apple / Intel announcement, Linux is looking better and better.