If you where wind the clock back almost exactly 2 years (okay 1 year, 11 months), you would find this entry on my blog, ranting about what a mistake the switch to intel processors was for Apple. Yes it was a bit of a rant, which I quickly relented on here.
Anyway things moved on and for a while I used a mac with an intel processor, but now I don't. The fact that I sold my MacBook Pro had nothing to do with the fact it was intel based, it was just that with my dual G5 and twin 19 inch monitors on my desk top, the laptop just didn't get used much any more.
At the time the original announcement was made there was lots of speculation about getting windows to run on macs and OSX on normal PC's.
As expected it didn't take long once the hardware was out there that people had got windows to run on the and of course as soon as this hack was 'out in the wild', Apple came along a released Boot Camp, and you could run windows natively and officially!
But what of the other way around, runing OSX on normal PC hardware?
Apple have probably made it hard to do, but then I'm sure Sony made it hard for the PSP to be hack, but it was and Microsoft made it hard for the xbox360 to be hacked, but once again it was (I won't mention the original xbox, because that wasn't that difficult to hack, apparently!)
There are lots and lots of very smart people out there on the internet with far to much spare time on there hands and lots of them want the kudos of being the first to hack these things. It doesn't matter how many experts you have making you new product un-hackable because there will always be 10 times that number tying to hack it and quite a few of them will be smarter/better than your experts! And once one person dose it, the hack will be out on the internet and everybody can have it.
So given this, why haven't we seen OSX running on normal PC hardware?
Could it be that the hacking community is scared of Apples lawers? No way. Or maybe they respect Apple to much to try? well Apple dose have a lot more respect than certain other OS manufactures I can think of, but again I think not. Maybe Apple has special versions of hardware? From what I've heard it's not so different (after all it can't be if you can run windows on it). So why?
The only reason that I could come up with is Apple hardware. Yes, Apples software is very cool and I would have said that's there biggest selling point, but maybe, just maybe it is the hardware. Yes it is very 'sexy' so much more so that PC's which are typically put together with standard parts , where as Apples have custom cases and internal's which as designed to work together.
I've just got to compare my dual G5 with the dell PC's at work. Internally (and externally too!) the G5 is a thing of beauty with not a cable in sight. The dells at work (I don't use one, fortunately having the only desk top mac in the company!) despite being built with custom cases still have cables in sight, okay they are neatly tied up, but they are still there. And look at the ease of opening my machine, one catch at the back and I've even got the option to show off the lovely interior by leaving the panel off a just having the clear cover in place. The dells just aren't the same.
So yes, I think that Apple hardware is the coolest bit about the company and reason that they will never license OXS to run on normal PC's (I hope anyway!)