Wrong. There is nothing to stop anyone creating a virtual machine product for the Mac. In fact someone did it a while back and it proved so popular, Microsoft bought it and now market it as Microsoft VirtualPC - and it is available for the Mac as well as your standard old Windows machines.

From the Mac virtual machine you can run yourself a copy of 98 or XP - even a Linux machine - although support for that is flakey at the mo...

I am afraid this is just FUD. Head over to http://developer.apple.com/ and take a look at the specs - the design, architecture and specification of the machines is all there for developers to ingest and get cracking with. Nothing Apple does between now and the Intel Mac launch is going to stop you from writing software for the platform.


OS X is not in beta and it is not 'entirely new'. If you care to look at ADC and opendarwin you will see that ports for x86 have been around since year dot. Apple themselves have said that for every PPC OS X release, there has been an internal x86 build - the same in all respects.


Why? - no one should be developing for one platform only. If you are developing for the Mac you should be compiling and testing against the two platforms, PPC and x86. That is what the developer tools Apple provided are for. The base code for your app will be virtually identical - you just build for the right (ie BOTH!!) platforms.

So it doesn't matter if it is the mini, a powerbook or power machine that is first off the x86 rank - developers are building for both platforms. PPC will be supported until at least 2010... and x86 binaries will start appearing next year. Most people won't even notice the transition - which is how it should be.

Hope that clears up some of the FUD.

OpenDarwin,
While I respect your opinions, in searching developer.apple.com for VT, Vanderpool, Pacifica or hypervisors, all I get is information on VT-100 terminal emulation and a suggestion for 'supervisor' over hypervisor. Ha!

I appreciate your education on VPC, but I've used virtualization on the Mac since Insignia Solutions SoftPC in the early 1990s, through VPC 7.0.2 and I've used Virtual Server since it was branded as a Connectix Preview. Also, I was an Apple developer from 1984 - 1997 until Amelio made it too painful to stay on the Mac, then I switched from native code to managed code, java first then .net.

I'm not spreading nor creating FUD.

What Apple does to classically stop anyone, including VMware is keep the roadmap and/or core technical details closed. And breaking APIs is par for the course. Sure Darwin is open source, but it isn't enough of OS X to develop a complete app. And Apple doesn't drop source as they develop Leopard, etal. because others could infer too much from that.

My point about the mini is this: Apple isn't going to upset the cart for their bread and butter Xserve, Powermac and Powerbook lines on a OS that will need major debugging. That's one reason why PowerPC lines and software is safe until 20xx or whenever.

Speaking of FUD, don't buy into Job's Reality Distortion(tm) field about OS X being compiled for x86 since aught zero. There's no secrets here, I remember NeXT/OpenStep x86. And I've known about Darwin-x86, I run it in a VM regularly. But "compiled for x86" and real-world use by actual customers and a support track record are a Pacific Ocean apart. Remember 10.0 or 10.1??

Apple's going to let early adopters and consumers bear the brunt of the x86 transition first -- not to mention all the developers who will have to buy production x86 units just to verify on 'production' hardware. Plus they have to return those $999 units they rented at WWDC 2005.

Finally, if you think a Universal binary will buy you Player functionality on PPC as seamless as the x86 version, then you are truly blind. Player is all about virtualizing x86 hardware. A Player on PPC that virtualizes a PPC machine and not an x86 machine is just not interesting. So on PPC you have to emulate an x86 CPU, that's just not something Xcode will do you.

So - first off the block, an iMac, and hey, what do you know...? a PowerBook replacement, the MacBook. No sign of the Mini, or gentle 'consumer' product introduction. Nope. It is a high end laptop. So, so much for that prediction. Some serious customers for a VMWare implementation now, eh?

Major debugging for the OS? No. It is production ready. It is shipping. Today.


Every developer who got a dev kit at WWDC now gets an Intel iMac, nothing more to pay. $999 well spent.

So, FUD it was then.

I think you're onto something here with ESX. As ESX creeps into the Citrix space, having the ability to host a bunch of OSX VM's for the graphics team is something that could sell a lot of OSX *software*. Plus the IT team doesn't have to worry about supporting another hardware platform. Hey if it was a good idea with Openstep (and it was), why are we about to be forced into buying locked x86 whiteboxes just to run this OS ? It's the interface the users care about, not the box under the desk. And the guys who *do* care what's inside the box (I'm talking about you there with the liquid-cooled dual-processor desktop rig keeping your room heated , would like the ability to pick out the best components and upgrade them at a faster pace that Apple would likely set.

Back on topic I still have a good working VM of OpenStep 4.2. I'm not sure if the statute of software limitations has passed yet, but if it has I'd be willing to donate it to whatever archive of VM's is being collected for VMware Player use.

CD

I'm just happy there are other people "on the same page" here. I've been using VMware on the PC platform for several years now...but I'm really a Mac guy. I've used Virtual PC and Orange Micro cards for x86 compatibility for over a decade. I realize that PPC architecture and necessary "emulation" has made the Mac unsuitable for VMware. Now that the x86 underpinnings are in place...I sincerely look forward to VMware on the Mac. I don't care if I can't run Mac OS X on non-mac hardware - I just want non-Mac OS's to run under a Mac Host. I would hope that with emulation out of the way virtualized system response would be much improved. I expect MS will release a VPC update eventually. To their credit they've done a decent job with VPC since they've taken it over- However; If VMware releases a product for the Mac OS - I promise to vote with my pocketbook. SOLD! (it's be great if I could just move my virtual volumes to the Mac and have them usable).

*kick*

I don't know if there are any similar threads about this subject, but I for one am really hoping for a VMware Player (or Workstation) for MacOS X x86.

The only thing that keeps me from buying a new shiny l33t superduper Macbook Pro actually is that I can't use Visio, Visual Studio 2005, etc..

Oh please YES! Our library has been slowly warming up to Apple and I deployed the first Mac lab with Intel iMacs 2 weeks ago and they are a huge hit. Any way I thought I'd never be saying this but me and the programming guy here have both switched to using Macs... and we love them so far. We're both former Linux overs, and still do, but we seem to have found a type of Linux bliss with these Macs.

Please make Remote Console and a player for the Mac. Beat MS to it!

Thanks,
Bart
Westerville Public Library