“So, Apple has released their dev kits for OS X on Intel hardware and I was lucky enough to be the recepient of one. I took a disk image off of this badboy and loaded it onto my tablet. It booted but unfortunately the tablet’s screen didn’t work. I tried booting with an external monitor and… it actually worked. Having configured linux in the past to recognize the wacom digitizer I set to work on getting it up in OS X. This proved none too difficult as the tablet essentially just has a serial port to which the digitizer is connected. The standard wacom drivers for OSX worked fine once I configured it for this port,” Charles Alexander writes in a posting over at Tablet PC Buzz.
“Still the screen of the tablet itself didn’t work. After much reading on OS X’s monitor configuration I set about building a config file for the tablet screen. It turned out to be easy enough, I just had to bypass the plug-n-play and hardcode the settings,” Alexander writes. “Screen rotation, the network card, wireless, the modem, USB, the touchpad, and I’m sure plenty of other stuff isn’t working. But with apple’s inkwell (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/inkwell/) this thing is really showing potential. After messing around with this thing for a few days I can’t believe apple themselves never released a tablet.”
The forum posting is here.
MacDailyNews Take: Of course, there’s no verifiable proof, but as Jeff Harrell recently wrote for The Shape of Days, “There is nothing at all that prevents the version of Mac OS X that runs on the developer transition machines from running on any PC with compatible components… Given Apple’s experiences with software piracy, particularly the rampant software piracy that spread developer builds of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger all over the Internet this past spring, Apple’s management from the top down knows full well that this developer preview will be in the hands of every kid with a cable modem within days of its release. Most of them will be able to install it on their own computers and run it and the full suite of iLife ’05 applications at full speed, and run most existing Mac software in translation. As a result, Apple will give thousands, possibly millions, of people a taste of Mac OS X running full speed on their own PCs. Apple’s giving their potential future customers a free taste, that’s what they’re doing. It’s a try-before-you-buy deal.”
John Dvorak recently predicted, “Once [Mac OS X for Intel] stabilizes in the wild, Apple announces that it cannot do anything about the piracy situation and that it’s apparent that everyone wants this OS rather than Windows. It’s ‘the will of the public.’ Apple then makes the stupendous announcement that it will sell a generic boxed OS, ‘for the rest of you!’ One claim is that it is a solution to spyware.”
Could we be starting to see Harrell’s and/or Dvorak’s ideas taking root? Will Apple use Intel’s Trusted Platform Module chip to keep Mac OS X off non-Macs in the future?
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple could use Trusted Platform Module chip to keep Mac OS X off non-Macs – June 14, 2005
Dvorak predicts Mac OS X for generic x86, Apple ‘Office’ suite, dawn of Mac viruses and spyware – June 13, 2005
Report: Apple Mac OS X 10.4.1 for Intel hits piracy sites – June 11, 2005
