Columnists predict Mac OS X for regular PCs

I totally agree, and I think Steve's turtleneck is too tight--it's cutting off the blood supply to his brain.

This will be the death of Apple hardware sales.

The big quesion is will virus writers compile their code for both PPC and intel?

what a load of shit! Apple makes over 80% of it's profits from hardware. So, of course the 'smart' move would be to give up those profits!

cant someone shut this asshole up?? I call him an asshole because all he does is spew shit!

Hopefully Steve is not stupid enough to ever OEM license OS X.

As long as Apple uses PPC processors that are better than Intel x86 processors, Apple hardware sales would not be hurt by offerring a retail box of an x86 version of OS X. However, when Apple switches Macs to the same inferior x86 platform then there will be a lot less reason for users to buy Mac hardware.

eswinson, great comment.

6. Spyware and viruses emerge on the Mac.

Yes, it will happen. No, it won't be more than a minor annoyance. Why, because the REASON malware is endemic on Windows has far less to do with the relative popularity of Windows, and far mroe to do with the design of the Windows desktop.

Viruses turned into an epidemic on Windows when IE was integrated into the desktop. There was a clear and distinct change in the ecosystem when that happened, and I was lucky enough to be able to observe the difference between a workplace that standardised on IE and Outlook, and one that banned them, and the difference between the two was startling... our corporate parent was hit by worm after worm, virus after virus, despite having early standardised on and enforced the use of antivirus software. We did nothing but tuning our browser and mail selection for a couple of years, we didn't even install antivirus software, and the biggest problem we had was people's mailboxes clogging up with infected mail from people in our parent company whenever a new mail virus went through them like a bag of dates through a short grandmother.

Mac OS X is not integrated with the Internet the same way. Webkit is not designed to "fail open" like the Microsoft HTML control - unless an application explicitly adds plugins (the way Dashboard does) there isn't even a mechanism for malicious email or web pages to "boost privileges" and infect your computer.

Which is why the virus situation on Mac OS X will never, unless Apple does something really stupid, be as bad as the post-1997 Windows world. At the worst, if it got Microsoft levels of market share for years, it would be like the early '90s where you really could get by with "keep your software up to date, use a firewall, and don't open unexpected attachments in email".

...probably won't happen. Maybe all Apple has to do is imbed a special bootrom (like early machines had, including Amiga) in between the layers of the motherboard, cover it with a bunch of goo so that no one can get to it to clone, and keep their hardware proprietary regardless of the CPU chipset that is used.

They fail to realize with Apple in charge of the hardware, ordinary PCs will still not be able to run OSX because they will lack a critical piece of hardware.

Will OSX get hacked to run without it? Maybe, but frequent updates to OSX and semi-annual hardware changes might make it difficult to keep up with.

It's psychological. They are lashing out at the OS and the OS community for some reason. Does this guy really think a lot of people will be motivated to overcome the technical challenges to create a virus? Wouldn't a lot of social engineering be required to spread it?

Many people hate windows and some of those people write viruses for Windows.

...this is Apple's finest hour - they may compete speeed & price wise with pc hardware, they have awsome inductrial design, they can expand their potential OS & software market (which purportedly has margins upwards of 90%) to the 95% of other computer users...?

I for one will soon be able to SELL my pc & stick with one faster apple 3+ghz intel based laptop running X & XP (XP for a few necessities), so for me it will not be an issue...

We may all benefit from being able to choose the best software from both platforms, which for one may wipe out the absolutely crappy mac accounting software, or perhaps raise the bar & improve markets for those writing X-ware that may tempt XP users... Perhaps Longshot will offer some relief from its cartoon-like interface as well...