OT: RE: Apple Goes Intel...

[Steven N. Hirsch]

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Eric Smith wrote:

> Jules wrote:
> > Has there been any word from Apple employees about feelings within the
> > company about this?
> 
> Yes.  The ones that are being laid off as a result of this are rather
> unhappy.  This includes ASIC designers, sustaining engineers, and
> various others.
> 
> I don't understand the people that are bitching about Apple giving up
> the "secret sauce" that makes the Mac unique.  The secret sauce is
> MacOS, and they're not giving that up.  To a normal user, the brand
> name of the CPU inside the box makes no difference.
> 
> What amazes me is that Apple didn't figure this out and switch a lot
> sooner.

My question is: Given the ability of upcoming Intel (and AMD) CPUs to 
self-virtualize seamlessly, how long will it take for someone to hack up a 
"preboot" supervisor layer which will support OS X on a garden-variety PC?

They would almost have to resort to hardware-based DRM voodoo to prevent 
it.

Steve