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Comment by H1Supreme | Hacker News Reader

For years and years, I've advocated that Apple should just release the OS like Windows. It runs fine on a lot of PC hardware you can buy off the shelf (I've built a few PC's that do just this). And, with the Nvidia drivers that were released a year or two ago, most graphics cards people want to run are available.

I realize that there's a lot involved with suddenly trying to support an array of hardware. But, maybe release with a set of suggested hardware, and a "no guarantees" sort of license.

I've always enjoyed MacOs, but the hardware has been a joke for some time now. My old G5 Mac Pro was the pinnacle of Mac desktops, imo.

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Apple did to that long ago with MacOS 7. It didn't work so well, since they undercut sales of their own hardware. Jobs killed the licensing when he returned to the company.

Today, OS X is good enough that is still gets people to buy their outdated hardware. They'd be crazy to license it and give up that lockin. It's not a good situation, but we're not going to see OS X licensed to other manufacturers anytime soon.

Those clones weren't too bad though. And IIRC, Power Computing did way more to evangelize the Mac platform at the time than Apple did. Their ads were great.

The clones were great. TOO great, they were a superior value to what Apple was selling on the high end, which was why they had to go.

Yes, the OS is great, but at this point the hardware is so unacceptable that they're going to lose all my business. If they split the OS out they'd at least get me to pay for that part.

Different use cases will have different hardware demands. I was a web developer don't give two shits about the hardware. Or at least present hardware is good enough for me.

This is a lot harder problem than it sounds. MacOS on a random piece of hardware would be out of the box a lot like the shitshow that desktop Linux is on a random piece of hardware. 90% of things would work and 10% wouldn't.

This is a matrix test problem of massive proportions and it would be hard for Apple to fund this, especially now that they have anchored the price of MacOS to $0.

Apple did in fact license their OS in the 1990s. Did not work out very well, financially, for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Licensed_Macin...

Indeed. However: much of the system is now based on FOSS; and given user upgrades have been free since, what, Snow Leopard in 2009?, there’s a case for them open sourcing the OS and saying “derivatives are fine provided no trademarks are used” or something like that.

The Newton didn't work out for them, but the iPhone and iPad did. The current conditions are different than the past.

I don't agree with this. I think Apple is right in that the real value comes from top to bottom integration.

For example, when they can ensure that there's a certain set of bluetooth and wireless chipsets, they can test against those, and have features tied to them. But that becomes increasingly difficult as you diversify hardware.

Except they aren't presenting any "value" right now. Everything is old and overpriced. It's been that way for the last 5 years. Many Mac users have been asking for an upgradable tower like the old G5's forever. We get jack shit.

I know it's a bad business move for Apple to license the OS. But, I'm failing to see a scenario where OEM's don't jump at the chance to make computers the integrate just as tightly as Apple does with their own hardware.

Technically, you can build the Darwin kernel from source, since they have it out there, along with some of their other, basic apps.

The rub for me was you needed to compile the kernel on a Mac to start with.

This was all years ago, and a lot could have changed since.

I'd pay $500 to license MacOS to run perfectly on my XPS13. Instead I have to do it myself with hacks and stuff.

If you want a painless process, you've basically got to go through the compatibility lists and find a laptop that is easily hackintoshed. More often than not, it's not the laptop you have or want to buy.

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