Intel Chief Executive Officer Craig Barrett says the Macintosh OS could run fine on Intel equipment--the tough part is convincing Apple Chairman Steve Jobs that it's a good idea.

Barrett briefly described the company's Vanderpool project, a new processor design capable of supporting multiple operating systems at a processor level, rather than in emulation mode.

"If you are able to, say, have two OSs running simultaneously, you won't have to rely on a single OS for everything," Barrett says. "So you could have Mac OS and Longhorn on the same system, using Longhorn for business stuff and Mac OS for personal stuff. But first you'd need to convince Steve Jobs that it's a great idea."

Dual Systems

Asked if the company will ever be able to get Apple to release systems based on Intel chips, Barrett said, "We keep trying, but frankly it gets less and less interesting each year."

Barrett did concede, "There are lots of interesting aspects in there. Steve Jobs is trying to appeal more to the Intel base. You might ask why he doesn't take his OS and try to compete in the other 98 per cent of the market. But he doesn't choose to do that."

Former Apple Chairman John Sculley recently acknowledged that Apple should have switched to Intel architecture years ago.

A Good Start

Barrett also confirms that Mac OS X's Darwin kernel "runs just fine" on Intel technology, but needs an application stack to make for a serviceable OS.

"You'll have to talk to Steve about that" he adds.

The Intel boss points out that Apple's small market share makes this a less interesting issue for the company. "Our sales can blip by Apple's share quarter on quarter," he says, "so we can shrink or grow by a couple of Apples."

Friday, October 24, 2003

Doesn't Apple have an internal version of Mac OS that runs on Intel? I thought I had read that at one time.

Why would anyone want to run Mac OS on Intel hardware? Intel is getting worse than MS (see my outsourcing jobs overseas rant).

Lets send Steve Jobs a thank you note.

Yeah, I'm still not sure if the "Marklar" project was true, or just a rumor.

Marklar = Rhapsody. I can't remember where the name Marklar came from, will have to look into that one

Apple has been serious enough about its ace in the hole to seed a few lucky civilians with prototype boxes – delivered heavily swaddled in layers of cloak-and-dagger security, natch. Specifically, recent testers report taking delivery of Athlon-powered boxes that Apple had assiduously welded shut to prevent prying eyes from ogling whatever other gremlins might be lurking inside these nondescript beige chassis.


On the software side, the mystery units have been stocked with current versions of Mac OS*X as well as several application packages in various states of preparedness, including versions of Apple’s Final Cut Pro video-editing software and “a popular, Mac OS*X-only browser.”

Interesting, they used athlons