The beauty of software is that it can be adjusted and ported to different processors.
I'd like to see Mac OS on Intel. Let's see what THAT does to the market.
Sorry, Bill, but that is a gross underestimation of the work involved. In reality, it is not the job Apple would have to do to move Mac OS X to Intel. The job would be getting all of the application vendors to now port their software over to the new platform.
Remember, the reason Carbon exists is because Apple could not make a valid business proposition for ISVs to rewrite their Mac applications.
These codebases represent huge amounts of time, investment, and organization. The marketing, support, qa, and engineering costs of maintaining a modern application are huge.
I'm not saying Apple couldn't transition to x86, but it would be huge undertaking that would make the 68k->PowerPC transition look like a warm-up.
Remember, it is not usually a question in commercial software of whether something "can" be done, it is usually just a matter of time and money. (Everyone out there with universal language proofs can take that argument offline). |
