The Mac Night Owl

http://www.macnightowl.com Copyright © 2006 Making The Impossible, Inc

Microsoft's Delays and Apple's Golden Opportunity

by Gene Steinberg

All the bad news from Microsoft appears to indicate the company has its share of problems. In fact, this has been a perfectly awful week for the house that Bill Gates built.

First, there's the news that the consumer version of Windows Vista will miss its holiday shipping deadline, and won't be out until 2007. PC box makers are going to have to find something else to sell their products, and don't be surprised if they take the hit and offer ultra-cheap or free Vista upgrades for folks who buy a new computer for the holidays.

Second, Microsoft reorganizes its Windows unit, and you can bet that's a strong public statement, regardless of the spin, that things have gone terribly wrong in its operating system arena. It's also meant to reassure everyone, including Wall Street, that the company will somehow get its act together. Of course, whether anyone believes it is another matter entirely.

And, as might be expected, the forthcoming Office 2007 gets a late slip too, and this will supposedly allow for a simultaneous release of both products. Of course, missing the critical holiday season no doubt means that Microsoft will need to ramp up the Xbox publicity machine, to divert your attention and surely to compete with Sony's PSP 3, which will be in full bloom by then. That is, unless Sony, too, is beset with still another delay.

Meantime, in this corner is Apple Computer with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gain a huge amount of market share at the expense of Microsoft. It's not, of course, as if lots of businesses will all suddenly desert the Windows platform and buy new Macs, even if the technique to dual-boot both operating systems has been greatly simplified by then. That's a market that will provide only modest support for the Mac and, as usual, largely in the creative departments. When it comes to consumers, however, it'll be a different story, and here Apple might have the entire field largely to itself, even if PC makers fall over themselves offering deals to get the Vista upgrade, whenever that really ships.

As a practical matter, you might expect that Apple will want to shorten its Leopard development time, and that Steve will get the troops in line to get it out in some decent form by late October or early November. But will it even be possible? Bear in mind that the WWDC won't occur until August, and developers are going to want a reasonable amount of time to absorb the changes in 10.5 and get to work bringing their products in line. No doubt there will have to be special kits to allow developers to harness the new features in their own products and forcing them to add support within a couple of months will be no mean trick. Lest we forget, many will still be trying to get their Universal upgrades out the door.

Yet, most of the heavy lifting of Mac OS X has already been done, and it may well be that Apple can not concentrate on packing on new and improved features without affecting the basic plumbing. That means that the need for major updates won't be necessary. Just about anything that runs properly on Tiger will run on Leopard, and if that's the case, as many hope, it won't matter if there's a very short window of opportunity. Now that would be a statement that'll get loud cheers, because it'll provide reassurance to developers that they don't have to do a thing to ensure full Leopard support.

Remember, also, that all new Macs will be shipping with Intel processors by then. In fact, you may likely see second-generation versions of the MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac mini, since Intel makes frequent and very public updates to its chips. There will be plenty of stuff to sell for the holidays, and having all that gear ship with a brand new version of the Mac OS will be the icing on the cake. At the same time, Apple won't have to confront the Windows marketing machine head on. It'll have the field for itself.

But there is one potential downside here, regardless of whether Leopard ships before the end of the year or not, and that's whether people truly care about operating systems these days. This is a point I've raised before. While Microsoft will probably have a harder time persuading its customers to upgrade to Vista, at least until there's plenty of vetting time to check for serious bugs and other issues, it won't be a cakewalk for Apple.

I mean, how often do you really want to spend $129 for Mac OS upgrades, when the one you're using runs perfectly fine now? Sure, Apple has slowed its operating system development process to a more reasonable level. I'm even sure that it will graft some awesome features onto Leopard to entice you to buy a copy. But, other than getting it on a new Mac, will you just decide you are perfectly content with Tiger for now?

On the other hand, Apple will probably be too busy selling iPods and other consumer electronics gear to care.

The Tiger Report: Do You Really Want to Run Mac OS X on a Plain PC?

Last year, when Steve Jobs announced that Macs would soon sport Intel processors inside, some wondered whether that meant that Mac OS X would eventually run on just about any PC box, such as a Dell, HP, Gateway and all the rest. "No", said Apple. The Mac operating system was meant strictly for Mac hardware, although they'd do nothing to prevent you from running Windows. Of course, they wouldn't help you either, and, frankly, no effort to install Windows on a Mac without an emulator has succeeded, at least not yet. [Note: See the Letter from the CEO April 2006 macCompanion.]

In some quarters, saying "no way" is nothing more than a challenge to do it anyway. Once prerelease copies of Mac OS X for Intel got into the hands of developers, a few predictably also turned up on peer-to-peer networks, and crackers went to work to see if they could prove Apple wrong. Despite the expected hardware and software protections, a few reports appeared that proclaimed success in making it run on a vanilla PC.

Were Apple's efforts to keep the Mac OS on real Macs doomed to failure? A good question, and it's a sure thing that protective measures were enhanced once the first MacIntels shipped. But that didn't stop some folks from just working that much harder to find back doors and other methods to make it happen anyway.

To be sure, Apple's legal department has gone after sites that posted the methods used to hack Mac OS X to install on non-Apple hardware. But this is apt to remain a cat-and-mouse game, with Apple enhancing its dead bolt locks and methods being found to break down the doors anyway.

Forgetting the legal ramifications, consider the time it takes to engage in this questionable process. Now consider that you can buy a real Mac, the mini, for just $599, and that it contains far more goodies that you'd find in most any PC box anywhere near its price, and you wonder why people bother. Well, there is, of course, the badge of honor, being able to do something that someone else tells you can't or shouldn't be done.

But let's not forget that getting Mac OS X to install and boot on a regular PC is only part of the process. While Apple provides plenty of printer drivers covering most popular models, except the recent ones, what about support for all the thousands of possible hardware setups out there in the wild? What about drivers for graphic cards, sound cards, and all the rest? Is it worth all the bother just to get your $299 Dell PC to function properly as a faux Mac?

Yes, I'm sure that Apple will continue to do what it can to keep these characters from misappropriating its intellectual property. Whether you like it or not, it's not just a matter of fiddling with installers and engaging in other sorts of legerdemain to fool the operating system so it works on ordinary PC hardware. The copies of Mac OS X in the wild now are mostly pirated copies, clearly illegal. Of course, I suppose some people who actually bought new Intel-based Macs are using the genuine installer DVDs to perform their illegal acts.

Illegal? Yes, because Apple licensed its operating system to run strictly on its own hardware. That could, of course, change, but I rather suspect it would only happen in a dire emergency, in the event sales of real Macs somehow hits bottom, and I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future. Otherwise, it would be over the dead body of Steve Jobs, the man who killed Apple's one and only attempt at licensing its operating system.

It all comes back to this basic question: What makes a Mac a Mac? From a practical standpoint, do you really think millions would pay what they might consider a premium price for a genuine Apple product, however attractive it looks, when there's a cheaper alternative that runs the very same operating system? If you take a thin putty knife and open the case of, say, the new Mac mini, would you find much, if anything, that differs from a standard PC? The hard drive and the optical drive would be the same, as would the RAM. The logic board? Well, it's a standard Intel chipset, complete with integrated graphics and such things as USB, FireWire and Ethernet chips are pretty standard these days. So aside from the simple, compact case, what separates the mini from a generic PC?

That's a rhetorical question, of course, but it explains why Apple doesn't want you to run Mac OS X on other personal computers. That, however, won't stop crackers from finding ways around whatever protective measures are taken by Apple, regardless of the legal consequences. Of course, every time they succeed, it will only encourage Apple to work harder to enhance its security.

In the end, a small community of people who succeed in running Mac OS X on their PC boxes will probably persist. Even a warning from an attorney with the threat of a lawsuit, or the actual legal papers, won't stop them. But maybe it'll encourage them to consider the easy way out of their dilemma, which is to just buy a Mac.