OS X for Commodity PCs April 10, 2006
Posted by samwyse in Uncategorized.add a comment
I would like to point out one way that Apple could control the hardware of innumerable clone manufacturers: Use a virtual machine. This would fit with Cringley’s comparison to something similar to Boot Camp. The user would boot a simple VM hypervisor that provides a consistent architecture, and then boot OS X on top of that. This would somewhat reduce the performace of the computer, but I don’t see that as being a bad thing, from Apple’s point of view. Instead, Apple gets a way for people to try out OS X on hardware that they already own, along with a reason to buy Apple’s hardware if they like what they see; they only need to adjust the performance of the VM so that Apple’s hardware provides a better performance-cost ratio running OS-X natively than anyone else’s hardware running the hypervisor.
