New and Noteworthy: Will Apple allow clones again?; Apple's Intel-ready OS X on a par with Power PC-based range; more

Will Apple allow clones again? Silicon.com speculates that Apple may once again license the Mac OS to clone-makers -- igniting a true platform war. "t the time of the Intel announcement in June, Apple admitted it has been porting OS X to Intel since day one. Does this indicate a cautious approach to platform deployment or point to a longer-term strategy? Speaking at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller insisted OS X would run on Apple hardware only. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said. While the task of porting OS X on an Intel machine would be relatively straightforward - a number of enterprising hackers have already claimed to have done so - enabling the huge number of drivers, peripherals and application would be a far more onerous task for third-party developers worldwide." More.

Apple's Intel-ready OS X on a par with Power PC-based range PC Pro reports that the version of OS X that Apple is developing in preparation for its transition to Intel hardware has caught up with the publicly available version. "The latest x86 version is said to have much stronger security controls than before, designed to prevent the software from being hacked to run on non-Apple hardware." More.

PC Magazine's iMac G5 (built-in iSight) review PC Magazine has a review of Apple's iMac G5 with built-in iSight, noting performance measurements "In PC Magazine Labs, we tested Adobe Photoshop CS2's performance, which was very good. The scores�Gaussian Blur at 5 seconds, Unsharp Mask at 3 seconds, Lighting Effects at 9 seconds, and Image Resize at 10 seconds�show that the iMac is powerful enough for light to medium graphics duties. These tasks, particularly Image Resize, often take more than a minute on older Macs with previous versions of Photoshop. The iMac G5 is certainly powerful enough for day-to-day office and graphics tasks, and it's a step above the Mac mini, which is best used for basic tasks. Anyone who uses a quad-core PowerMac at work should be happy with the iMac's performance at home. [...] Doom 3 performance is still fairly anemic, at 20 frames per second, though this is an improvement over the previous iMac G5, a 2.0-GHz machine that came with Radeon 9600 graphics and got a score of 14 fps at the same 1,024-by-768 resolution. We're sure the improvement is due to the upgraded graphics (X600 XT) and the new PCIe-based motherboard. But Doom 3 performance still lags behind that of mainstream Windows PCs with discrete graphics." More.

Maxtor offers 1 TB drives Maxtor has announced a new storage solution for PCs that can be purchased with capacities up to a terabyte. The company said Wednesday that the new Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition will ship in either a 600-GB or 1-TB capacity point, at $549.95 and $899.95, respectively, beginning in December, according to ExtremeTech. More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• PowerBook G4s (Double-Layer SuperDrive) [#7]: Mac OS X 10.4.3 fixes sudden loss of AirPort connectivity for some, not others
• Mac OS X 10.4.3 (#4): What to do if you have an incomplete update; Fan problems (continued); Disk Utility problems; more

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