With the release of Mac OS 10.2 (or should we say X.2?), Apple Computer has produced arguably the most powerful, stable, general-purpose OS available. And one with far fewer Big Brother features and security holes than Microsoft Windows has. OS 10.2 is, in many ways, what Windows should aspire to be. Even open-source boosters will admit that OS X is years ahead of Linux as a desktop OS when it comes to ease of use, ease of configuration and application availability.
The quality of OS X -- combined with the increasingly large speed gap between the PowerPC family of chips that power Apple computers and the Intel and Intel-clone chips used by PCs -- has led to speculation that Apple will release a version of OS X for Intel machines. Portions of OS X reportedly are already running on Intel. Considering that Apple has pulled off one successful and near-miraculous chip swap (from the Motorola 68000-series to the PowerPC chips), it's not far-fetched to imagine that it might engineer an even more dramatic transformation.
But it is hard to believe when you consider the way Apple makes its money. Apple is a hardware vendor -- most of its sales and profits come from hardware sales. When Apple executives took a brief dip into licensing Apple clones in the 1990s, they realized the danger in competing with their own bread and butter. And while OS X is a notable accomplishment, a significant amount of its stability and reliability can be ascribed less to its solid Unix underpinnings and more to the fact that those writing the Mac OS must contend with a relatively small number of system variations. A shift to commodity Intel processors would threaten the stability of OS X.
So don't count on Apple adopting a generic Intel platform (sorry, Dell guy, no OS X for you). However, the more possible if less intriguing question is whether Apple will jump ship from the PowerPC chip and produce proprietary OS X machines built on Intel architectures. Apple can't ignore the speed gap forever, and when high-end PCs with 2.2-GHz+ Intel chips outperform PowerPC-powered Macs with 1.25-GHz chips at routine Photoshop tasks, throwing dual-processors into every server and desktop box isn't going to help.
Will Apple make the big switch? The hazy crystal monitor says: maybe, but not anytime soon. Meantime, Apple will just have to keep making OS X faster and better, and sending love letters and cases of Bawls and Red Bull to IBM's chip engineers. And those of us who want to use the best and coolest desktop OS available will have to plunk down our bucks for a box with a big white apple on it.
--Richard Hoffman, rhoffman@nwc.com
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