[jimbosyn]

For me the real question is what are the specs on these "developer transition kits". I would love to get an asp dump from one of these once they get in the hands of developers. The question that is unanswered from the wwdc is if the intel macs will have hardware lock in. Will OSX run only on Apple made intel hardware? This was not addressed by Jobs. Will developers be able to post kit specs or are they bound by an NDA?(non disclosure agreement)

[Commodus]

Aside from the 3.6 GHz P4, not much else is known about the transition kits.

Regarding OS X, after the keynote Apple went very much on record as saying that OS X wouldn't run on non-Apple computers. They wouldn't stop people from running Windows on a Mac, but of course don't expect any drivers or support from Apple.

[MAC-ALEX]

MacOS Tiger pre-release should run on the any PC box with hardware compatible as box that Apple release to Developers.
http://developer.apple.com/documenta...ection_18.html

[Stephen-I-Am]

I'm thinking about this too. Other questions are: what else is in the computer? Superdrive, which graphics card, how much RAM/storage...

I have a feeling that drivers will be available for a very limited choice of graphics card...

Stephen

[jimbosyn]

My opinion is that Apple will either use some sort of processor serial number checking (anyone remember the pIII serial number debacle?). Or a custom firmware/bios. Another way that Apple can do this is to use only specific chipsets that only they have drivers for. That way, even if the hacker community circumvents the hardware checking to allow OS10 to run on a dell, they will still face a situation where the hardware does not work. For example, OS10 can do a check for unknown chipset types and not boot. Apple can then control their hardware very carefully for several reasons. First is quality. Proprietary hardware is a double edged sword. It provides for an incredable amout of stability since the software maker also dictates the hardware. This is the good part. The flip side is that because of this, cost is higher. I'm willing to pay for the superior design and stability.

Another point: Even if the hacer community figures out how to get OS10 on any pc hardware-which there is no doubt it will- this is really a non issue. Can you see grandma, or mom and dad going to newsgroups or p2p networks to get software to hack their Dell to run OS10? Or for that matter, break out a soldering iron and hotwire in an apple firmware chip? When this happens, it will not really affect mac sales anyway since those who do the hacking would not have bought a mac anyway.

So, back to the developer transition kits. For $1500 one of us could get the answer! Apple developer select membership is $500 and the transition kits are $1000! You can bet that there will be some hacker types to get the developer kits and have OS10 running on Dell's before the first mac ships.

Interesting times!

[yaro]

The question I have is will the pc ATI and NVIDIA video cards work out of the box? Or do they have to be mac specific? How about pc perepherals, pci cards?

[tooki]

Not a Power Mac discussion.

tooki