“Simplicity. OS X’s built-in dictionary (based on the Oxford American Dictionary) defines simplicity as “The quality or condition of being easy to understand or do.” The thesaurus gives words like ease, clarity and effortlessness,” Chris Howard writes for Apple Matters.
“In the last day or so, I have used a PowerBook G4 1GHz, an eMac G4 800Mhz and an iMac G3 400Mhz (on which I’m writing this). On all three computers, I’ve run the same system. I’ve been running off an external hard disk drive that has my operating system, my applications and my files on it,” Howard writes.
Howard writes, “I’ve been working this way for about six months, ever since my PowerBook’s hard drive gave up the ghost. And every time I switch to another computer, I’m amazed all over again.”
“All I have to do is plug the hard drive into a Mac and boot from it. (Hold the Option key at boot-up to see a list of bootable drives.) No configuration or reconfiguration necessary. ZERO. Zilch. Nil. Nada.” Howard writes. “I can plug my external hard drive into any Mac with Firewire and it will boot up fine. Try that on a PC!”
Full article here.
Is this then possible to do with a firewire or USB 2 hard drive based iPod?
My mac can open tuna cans. Try that with a PC!
Just don’t try it with any flash based drives. Though I doubt those are available in sizes suitable for installing an OS on.
Reality Check:
No, a Mac is not a PC… a computer, as anyone familiar with them will tell you, is greater than the sum of its parts. A Mac is the whole thing: OS, hardware, design, buying experience, user experience, etc.
Yeah, I’ve done this for ages, after my TiPB started giving me a SMART warning that the internal boot drive was failing. I moved everything to an external FW harddrive. Of course, I also moved everything to a laptop drive in a small external FW case. And, I put a OS X with Diskwarrior on my 2G iPod, as a troubleshooter, and I also have OS X on a 5gig Firefly, which uses the same drive as the 1G iPod.
Eventually, I got around to changing out the bad harddrive.