I'm never buying another Sony computer...

[cstaylor]

I've got the

[cstaylor]

OS X is pretty nice... you need a decent machine to run it (G3 machines with slow hard disks poke along at an unbearable rate), but the UI is really cool.

What kind of utilities are you running on your PC that don't work on VirtualPC?

[cstaylor]

...when Steve Jobs is dead and buried. The only reason Microsoft is as big as they are today is through the Microsoft Tax: instead of expecting customers to buy their O/S (yeah, right!), they force the manufacturers to pay, and pass those costs onto the user. Do you really think anyone would actually buy OS X for Intel?

[cstaylor]

You're obviously not a Windows user. It's a love hate relationship. A lot of Windows users have no love Microsoft or Windows and would love to have an viable alternative (open hardware with a broad range of applications). Not everyone is using Linux just because it's free.

I'm a Windoze user... I've only been doing Mac stuff for the last couple of years (got a job contracting to a company that does low-level Mac programming, and they needed someone who knew Unix to handle the Mac OS X work)... OS X for Intel exists (well, the core operating system at least: Darwin), and since most of that code is written in a system-independent fashion compiling the rest of the platform (minus Classic support) would probably be very easy to do.

I hope Apple doesn't release an OS X for Intel, because it would just go the way of BeOS (a better Windows, but no vendor will preinstall it for fear of the Redmond giant) or Solaris x86.

[cstaylor]

And before you reply, make sure your thoughts haven't already been covered on MeFi.

It's not going to happen, Captain. Cringley's entire point is to make Microsoft stronger... why would Apple commit suicide by giving Microsoft a new target to kill, an excuse to the government about the "competitive marketplace", and lose the tight hardware integration?

My answer is: "stop being a cheapass and go and buy a Mac... iMac's are cheap, and the LCD monitor is built-in".

One point that is *not* brought up is piracy. Microsoft goes through all sorts of contortions to make sure their O/S isn't pirated (but it still is). Apple has the best copy protection in the world: you gotta own a Mac to run their stuff.

[cstaylor]

Errrrrr!!! Yip Yip Yip!