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General discussion

apple computers and apple OS X

Jan 31, 2007 5:53AM PST

why is it that you have to purchase an apple brand computer in order to have a computer that runs it's operating system OS X? doesn't seem strange that there are no other computers that come installed with OS X. i think that it is strange that Microsoft got sued because it did not allow competitors software in there software bundle but at the same time in order to use apple OS x you have to buy an apple. i the OS X system was available to other manufacturing then Microsoft would have real competition and apple will have to reduce there prices, in other words the consumer wins.

Discussion is locked

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MacDYI
Feb 2, 2007 9:48AM PST

Each Mac board has a special configuration and layout. Each has a special code name.

Even if you could copy (reverse engineer) all that, you'd still need a bios chip to make it work. You'd have to rip one off a salvage Mac.

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OS X
Feb 2, 2007 5:21PM PST

As for OS X on Macs only, that's not a monopoly, as there is an alternative: PC with Windows. It is a package deal, and the market is computers -- more than one choice for computers is allowed.

And the pricing isn't that far off, so that's not an issue... if you want upgradeability, get a Mac Pro...

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apple mac os x reply
Feb 3, 2007 6:45PM PST

Dear friend,
generally there are two types of architectures in computers
1.the IBM architecture and 2.Apple architecture
IBM arc computers mostly uses INTEL processors.these processors follow the instruction set which are supported by OS such as WINDOWS,LINUX,UNIX
etc
while the Apple arc computers uses MOTOROLA processors which follows a different instruction set which cannot be supported by OS such as WINDOWS,LINUX,UNIX etc and so APPLE MAC introduced APPLE OS X which supports MOTOROLA's instruction set and no other OS can support this instruction set

-from chakri

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Not quite
Feb 3, 2007 7:40PM PST

That was a good try at answering the question, but it's inaccurate.

There are WAY more than two architectures. m68k, MIPS, Alpha, Sparc, Itanium, AMD64, EMT64, PowerPC, and i386 is a reasonable, but not complete, list. There's no "IBM architecture" - IBM came up with PowerPC, which is what Macs used to use. The i386 (also known as x86) architecture is what most PCs use.

Yes, the PowerPC chips were also made by Motorola, but Macs no longer use them. Macintoshes now come with i386 and EMT64 chips. Windows does not currently support PowerPC, although there was a version of Windows NT which did. Linux and several Unixes are available for PowerPC as well as i386 and all the architectures I listed above.

Linux, BSD (Unix), and even BeOS supported PowerPC before Mac OS X was even created, so OS X wasn't developed for want of an operating system.