[ChillieMac]

Does everyone here know about the Sharp PDA that runsa portable Linux/Java OS? The hardware is the same as required for the Pocket PC Platform. Darwin is an Apple owned unix distro and Aqua is the windowing/gui for OS X. How much effort would there be to slim down and portify (yes, I made up the word!) Aqua (call it Sip) to sit on top of Darwin? Also, porting it to the StronArm processor would not be an issue given how portable OS X is supposed to be (as NeXT, it ran first on Intel chips). I can here some of you saying, what about cloning? Not an issue, if you sell the Portable OS X seperately, they could be installed over the Pocket PC platform on their hardware. One of the objections for not porting the OS X to the PC side was hardware supporting nightmare of thousands of different devices and manufacturers. With a very rigid standard set for Pocket PC, all devices are virtually identical. Ans Apple could either get into the mix with their own hardware or sell the OS for use on other vendors PDAs.

I really want to know people's thought on this, so chime in!
Also, I plan on making a mock up UI in Flash MX of the Portable OS X and if anyone wants to make a mock-up of the hardware, GREAT!

[mdcarter1]

Considering the fact that Aqua runs questionably on most desktop hardware, i would imagine it would pose quite a challenge to get it to perform on an imbedded device, however pared down it may be.

[Maneki Neko]

Originally posted by ChillieMac:
<STRONG>Does everyone here know about the Sharp PDA that runsa portable Linux/Java OS? The hardware is the same as required for the Pocket PC Platform. Darwin is an Apple owned unix distro and Aqua is the windowing/gui for OS X. How much effort would there be to slim down and portify (yes, I made up the word!) Aqua (call it Sip) to sit on top of Darwin? Also, porting it to the StronArm processor would not be an issue given how portable OS X is supposed to be (as NeXT, it ran first on Intel chips). I can here some of you saying, what about cloning? Not an issue, if you sell the Portable OS X seperately, they could be installed over the Pocket PC platform on their hardware. One of the objections for not porting the OS X to the PC side was hardware supporting nightmare of thousands of different devices and manufacturers. With a very rigid standard set for Pocket PC, all devices are virtually identical. Ans Apple could either get into the mix with their own hardware or sell the OS for use on other vendors PDAs.

I really want to know people's thought on this, so chime in!
Also, I plan on making a mock up UI in Flash MX of the Portable OS X and if anyone wants to make a mock-up of the hardware, GREAT!</STRONG>

I don't think it's terribly feasible. It's not a market that apple would probably want to enter again.

OS X is slow even on fairly recent desktop machines. With it's current widget set, I don't think it would scale well down to the size of a portable screen. Looking at the technology pile here, there's a lot of layers they would have to implement. Linux was chosen because it's small, and can be somewhat componentized. The price tag is also nice. A huge cost would be incurred in porting any of the Mac OS X technologies to a Pocket PC architecture, and it would take a long time to recoup the development costs.

Pocket PC devices aren't virtually identical. There are several different processor architectures. Windows CE/Pocket PC/whever they're calling it at the moment happens to run on them all though. There's currently a few Pocket PC devices you can install Linux on, but I'm betting most people won't use it.

To be honest, what would be the point of OS X running on a portable? You couldn't run your OS X native apps on it. I don't see the appeal. It took Microsoft a long time, many failures and a huge pile of money to get where they are in the PDA market. They don't even hold a majority stake