{"id":3360,"date":"2005-06-06T13:39:25","date_gmt":"2005-06-06T20:39:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2005\/06\/06\/initial-thoughts\/"},"modified":"2019-12-16T13:54:25","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T21:54:25","slug":"initial-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2005\/06\/06\/initial-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Initial thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:8129,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/mac.the-underdogs.org\\\/index.php?show=game&amp;id=553&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/mac.the-underdogs.org\\\/index.php?show=game&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:8130,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/mac.the-underdogs.org&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20190901091612\\\/http:\\\/\\\/mac.the-underdogs.org\\\/&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-10 04:42:49&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:403},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-06 05:50:11&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:403}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-06 05:50:11&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:403},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:8131,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.lowendmac.com\\\/musings\\\/boxes.shtml&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20131015145540\\\/http:\\\/\\\/lowendmac.com\\\/musings\\\/boxes.shtml&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.lowendmac.com\\\/musings\\\/boxes.shtml&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-07 09:41:40&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-06 05:50:10&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-06 05:50:10&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>Some brief initial thoughts on today&#8217;s news&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There&#8217;s a rousing snowball fight going on in hell right now.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>IBM just got spanked. Hard.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>From a user-standpoint, this may not be as big of a deal as some might fear. Apple has plenty of past experience dealing with potentially difficult and disastrous transitions. Most recently, of course, the OS transition from OS 9 to the UNIX-based OS X; more applicable to this situation, however, is their earlier switch from the Motorola 680&#215;0 processors to the IBM\/whoever-else-was-involved (I&#8217;m on lunch and trying to post this quickly, so I&#8217;m not looking up all the little details) PowerPC processors.<\/p>\n<p>From my standpoint, both prior switches were handled quite well. With the number of ways that things could break, it&#8217;s amazing how much <em>didn&#8217;t<\/em>. Case in point, just this weekend I downloaded the game <a href=\"http:\/\/mac.the-underdogs.org\/index.php?show=game&amp;id=553\" title=\"Macintosh Garden: Crystal Crazy\">Crystal Crazy<\/a> from the <a href=\"http:\/\/mac.the-underdogs.org\/\" title=\"Macintosh Garden\">Macintosh Garden<\/a>, a repository for &#8220;abandonware&#8221;. This is a game that was written for 680&#215;0 systems, so it&#8217;s outdated by many years, one software transition, and one hardware transition&#8230;and <em>it still works<\/em>. Granted, the sound doesn&#8217;t work, and it has to be run from the disk image instead of being copied directly to the hard drive, but the fact that it works at all (680&#215;0 code running through the PowerPC emulation inside the Classic environment on an OS X system) is a rather resounding testament to the work Apple did in ensuring backwards compatibility &#8212; and I have no doubt that they will do everything they can to continue this trend.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>This certainly <em>doesn&#8217;t<\/em> mean that the Mac is suddenly going to turn into Windows. No matter what kind of processor is providing the underlying power, it&#8217;s OS X that is the heart and soul of the Mac &#8220;experience&#8221;, and that&#8217;s not going to change (well, not beyond future OS upgrades that is).<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s extremely unlikely that we&#8217;ll start seeing &#8220;install anywhere&#8221; OS X boxes that will allow OS X to be installed on any random x86-based system. Much of what makes a Mac a Mac is the tight integration between the OS and <em>known<\/em>, Apple-approved system components, and I don&#8217;t see them giving that up and attempting to support the nearly-infinite possible hardware configurations of homebrew PCs. The processor may be going to Intel, but that doesn&#8217;t preclude Apple from keeping tight control of their motherboards and keeping OS X on their proprietary hardware.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I expect plenty of hackers will be doing everything possible to circumvent that. It&#8217;ll be interesting to see how successful they are, and how soon they pull it off.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>I expect that Virtual PC will be undergoing a <em>major<\/em> shift in a couple years, possibly moving to something closer to the fabled &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lowendmac.com\/musings\/boxes.shtml\" title=\"Low End Mac: Red Box, Blue Box, Yellow Box\">Red Box<\/a>&#8216; of the Rhapsody years. No more emulation layer to worry about &#8212; Windows will be able to run native code on the Intel processors that it&#8217;s written for, at full speed. In theory (and this is definitely theory, as I&#8217;m no programmer), all VPC would really have to do is create an isolated virtual machine for Windows to run inside, much like the Classic layer already does for pre-OS X applications. Perhaps we could even see Windows apps running outside of the VPC window, side-by-side with OS X and Classic applications? It&#8217;d be a UI nightmare, sure, but it might not be outside the realm of possibility anymore.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>I can&#8217;t wait until I get off work and can really dive into all the various analysis and speculation after this. I&#8217;m going to have a lot of reading to do tonight!<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Any other thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some brief initial thoughts on today&#8217;s news&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2039],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-3360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}