Re: MacOS, Rhapsody, and Intel
Apple seems to be presenting us with a riddle: if Road A and Road B converge, what's the name of the new road? The answer seems to be: the name that the most people are familiar with.
In other words, they decided that in converging Rhapsody and MacOS, it made more sense to give the new OS the name that is most familiar to Mac developers and users, namely MacOS. Makes perfect sense from a marketing standpoint. What's confusing us, I think, is that because the new OS will be largely Rhapsody, the naming scheme doesn't make sense from a technical standpoint.
If Rhapsody is becoming MacOS, then why can't the code technology that allows the Red Box to sit on top of MacOS work?
Or to put it the other way around: if MacOS is becoming Rhapsody...
I understand that, technically, Red Box (MacOS on Intel, at least I think this is what you mean) should be possible. Whether Apple pursues it or not is a different matter.
Indeed, is MacOS simply a new Rhapsody relying on MAC x.x code in lieu of new Rhapsody code for the baseline system.
No, Rhapsody will still be the baseline system. (But again, we may be confusing names because of the above riddle).
The base of the system is the Mach kernel, which is portable across many platforms. On top of that will be Yellow Box APIs (mostly the former OpenStep) and certain MacOS APIs (Carbon).
Could not developers now write for the MacOS like Apple wanted them to right for Rhapsody, so that all MacOS-written applications would also run in the Intel arena? Just wondering?
Technically, yes, I gather this is possible.
My sense is that Steve still has some tricks up his sleeve, and he's waiting to pull them out when the time is right. The biggest question is the cross-platform one, and how Apple plans to licence software or build hardware if (or more likely, when) their OS runs on multiple plaforms. Currently they are putting a lot of effort into spreading the word that PPC is the best platform. That would seem to indicate that they will leave the non-PPC hardware for others to build. Time will tell.
rhet0ric |
