Title says it all. I am doing a little research for a blog I want to write up on my website about different OS platforms. One thing that I am trying to figure out, is that would it appeal to people to load OS X on their PC, and would they be willing to pay for it?
If so, would you even consider buying Mac hardware, or only run it if they allowed you to buy it and install it on your PC?
What are your thoughts and concerns if this were possible?
This is completely hypothetical and while there are projects out there like OS X x86 I am talking about official pay for software from Apple.
So the standard price for OS X is like $99 to $129 depending on if you can get the upgrade, or $199 for a 5 install license (they call it the family pack), would you be willing to buy it and try it on your PC?
Thanks for everyone who voted, if you don't mind elaborating your decision either I would appreciate it and also be interested in what you have to say.
I voted no. But in order to make sense of my vote I should explain.
I personally don't like the Mac OS interface, and I am not a big fan of many of the implementation of many of the administrative tools. Yes, I could install tools to do things those things way I want but as someone who works mostly from the command line it makes more sense for me to use something which behaves in a more traditional way such Solaris, GNU/Linux or BSD. Also I don't use any of the software for which Macs are the ideal platform.
Having said that, from a business perspective if there was a truly legitimate (not ambiguous) way to do this and people reporting to me wanted to use OS X and it would run on the standard hardware provided to them I wouldn't have a problem approving it on the condition that they could perform all of their work without needing to use another paid-license OS.
I also use the command line and like to script everything, however, that doesn't mean it can't be efficiently done from the GUI. The one thing I love about OS X is that when I do something on the back end (be it shell script or Casper Policy at work) there is almost always a GUI answer for it. So, I can tell another person in the IT department who doesn't know Unix how to do it through the GUI if need be.
I would just like to see better market competition. Also, I think Apple has achieved something with Unix that no one else has done, and I think (but could be wrong on this) that OS X is the most widely used Unix based OS.
The problem with relying on the topmost system layer is the lower, less visible ones may end up badly neglected. I haven't seen much refinement to OSX's UNIX underpinnings at all; it's enough to run Darwin, and beyond that they don't demand much of it. Darwin gets the new features and development.
I voted perhaps. I have never used OSX so I would need to get some hands on to evaluate. If the provided a free 120 day trial install or similar I would definitely give it a decent go before deciding whether to build a box for it.
For me, I just can't see spending money on what I see as basically repackaged BSD, and without the freedom of open source and the wow-factor of things like Compiz Fusion. Why not just use Linux?
On the other hand, I absolutely understand the desire to have an OS which is as well maintained as the Mac OS is, and which might be considered more user-friendly than any of the pure unix-like systems. But what of Linux Mint? Or Ununtu/Kubuntu? Anyone could use those. And I suspect that if more people knew about them (and the fact that they don't need the Mac architecture to run), they would.
Yes I agree, but Apple has made it so everything can be done through the GUI, no command line needed. They also have added tons and tons of command line applications that interface with their applications from the GUI, which is really nice.
Well, just a few thoughts about the command line and the GUI, they all kind of tie into everything. These binaries are scriptable and can be ran from the from either the comamnd line or GUI
I mean these commands almost all have GUI front ends of some sort, and they all tie into each other very nicely. I find the general documentation and support better than most distros of Linux and Unix. Since I am an OS X sys admin by trade I love writing small scripts to configure my 6,000+ clients and it makes it easy that almost anything you can configure in the OS GUI wise also has a command line counter part which can help you get your job done.
Now on the other hand you average user will never have to open up the terminal they can do almost everything I am talking about by the GUI, which is nice to have it both ways.
Neo, I used to admin a bunch of Windows and Novell servers at my old job. 80 servers, 10,000 PC windows clients, maybe 300 Macs. I did all the Mac work with one other guy and then did some PC work.
Now at my new job I have 30+ Xserves running 10.5.5 Server, and 6,700 Mac clients all in a pure open directory environment. I use a third party suite called Casper from Jamf Software.
I can tell you from my experience that package deployment is not only easy, it is way customizable and there are so many things I can do with it. Very very robust products. I can push out an application to all my clients with in a day if I really wanted to from my office. I can send them jobs to netboot and automatically reimage, from my office across the WAN.
Apple is lacking a few things here and there but really to be honest it is some of the best things I have worked with, when it works. I don't mean to say they don't work but I have definitely had my isues. 10.5.3 was a giant heap of dung and so was Work Group Manager 10.5.3 I wanted to thunder kick all my Mac servers at that point in time.
If you are going to run Web servers I would say Linux all the way, but if you want a file server, home directories, open directory, DHCP, or any other service you can run on a sever OS X Server isn't that bad.
My main comment from before was suppose to be, you can do everything from the command line or the GUI, you have a choice, which no Linux or Unix distro really has accomplished yet. Maybe Ubuntu has come close, but I can't compare the end user experience to that of a Mac.
I intalled TomCat, PHP 5 and MySQL on one of my servers through an installer package and it took all of 3 minutes to do so. Then configured it through the GUI. I just now need to brush up on my mysql command line abilities and I will be set.
When I talk about installing packages on "a remote server", I am talking about an environment where no GUI is possible. The server is only configured from a SSH connection.
I am not sure, and you are free to correct me, but I don't think OS X is the best choice for this type of "SSH-only command line remote admin" installations.
In your post, you conclude:
Are you saying that you can install and run these packages and configure completely from the command line without the GUI, via SSH, just like a Linux server?
Honestly, I only use OS X as a desktop and when I find a package like MAMP (LAMP for OS X) it seems to require a GUI click-and-install approach. Even the directions for install do not discuss any OS X "pure command line" linstallation approach.
Are you saying you can do 100% remote install, upgrade and configuration vis SSH? Yes or No? Thanks.
I guess because it is all self contained and does not need access to /Library for some reason.
If you wanted to install it from the command line you would have to download the binary and compile it yourself, or use the mount and cp or mv commands to move it form the disk image to the /Applications folder.
If it was self contained though you can run it from anywhere, not just the /Applications folder.
If I recall, by default OS X 10.5 has PHP 5, MySQL and Apache installed by default. The only one I am iffy on is MySQL, not sure if it is installed by default.
So really you just need to edit your Apache config file to turn it on and point it to your web root folder which should be ~/sites or something like that (memory is drawing a blank atm and my macbook is in my laptop bag and I am being lazy....sorry)
...I voted perhaps. It's all in how they deliver it to the PC world. I have to agree with some of the points made by the other members. As someone who has owned and used two OS X Macs and three versions of that OS (10.1, 10.2 and 10.3) between them, I agree that quite a bit of what Apple "sidles off" to Developer Tools installs or their X11 implementation (granted, less and less as time goes on) would make the standard-install OS a lot more useful in the Linux/Unix world.
I do recall rumors, reliable rumors, and the distillations of pundits with broader views than myself over the decades that would lead me to believe this is Apple's habitual mode d'emploi. Take for instance the several times during the 25+ years Motorola was building their hardware; Moto would suggest adding a feature or capability to a model or model line, and Apple's brass, many of whom were groomed in the classic Jean-Louis Gassee fashion by Steve Jobs himself before his foray "into the wilderness," would demur and tell Moto, in effect: "Wait till we roll-out our next OS version."
(For those who aren't familiar with the name or story, Jean-Louis Gassee was a onetime president of Apple France. Jobs brought him to sunny Cali and made him a VP. He canceled a scheme to put the Mac OS on another company's hardware in the 11th hour. When he left to start Be, Inc, he "got his' when he wouldn't pay the package fee Apple insisted on to outsource his BeBox hardware to his old employers. The BeBox, as you may recall, disappeared from the market.)
But back to the subject of the thread/poll.
It's a maybe with me -- I'd like to see ahead of time that they intend to give the rest of us something as good -- or maybe better in ways that count -- than what Mac hardware owners have and use.