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August 13, 2005
Intel MacOS X or the Tiger gets the x86
It was innevitable. Despite Apple's best efforts (the conspiration theorists will diagree to that but anyway), an Intel (x86) version of Mac OS X, aka Tiger has made it to the net. The original distribution DVD is locked to a specific set of hardware, which includes checking the presence of a special chip in the system as well as the presence of SSE3 instructions.
Apparently, somebody found a way around these checks and produced not only tutorials on how to crack the protection, but also ready-to-use VMWare images:
tiger-x86.tar.bz2 - 1,319Mb
A few months ago I have predicted that Apple is likely to tie its operating system in some way to hardware, such as going from scratch with a 64 bit architecture - AMD64 or EM64T, or by relying on a special hardware card to for some of the existing Intel user mass to also buy their machines while switching from the Windows world to something which has less problems with malware, at least for now.
Even if I do not agree that Apple is willingly producing an "easy to crack" x86 MacOS X to induce user interest into its operating system, I think it is safe to assume that they are testing the market and they have considered the ideea of challenging Microsoft domination of OS market.
But in all cases, with the increasingly user dissastisfaction with Windows and the further delay of Vista, Apple's timing is nothing but perfect.
Posted by Costin Raiu at August 13, 2005 12:32 PM