“I’ve lost track of the many reasons that have been given for the switch to Intel, but this I know for sure: no one has ever reported that, for 18 months, Project Marklar existed only because a self-demoted engineer wanted his son Max to be able to live closer to Max’s grandparents.” Amazing.
Most of the Apple secrets seem to show up a fairly long time before release. Googling for ‘apple “switch to intel”‘ and a time frame of 2001 to 2002 gives lots of results. The iPhone wasn’t known in detail, of course, but it was known for years that Apple worked on a phone (and that it would be revolutionary, of course). Similar with the iPad, and even The New iPad’s retina screen. Let’s just hope that the push for retina screens on the MacBook Air isn’t just wishful thinking.
Last time I saw a rumour that was proven wrong was, I think, Nokia’s PureView phone that was rumoured to have a whopping 14 megapixels. Of course, that’s just because 41 seemed like a typo.
Kind of. Look at some the guesses for the iphone, most had buttons of some kind, with a classic ipod wheel. Because, Apple created the revolutionary click wheel which was the best interface for doing anything in the world!!!
Somethings leak, but like the the pureview thing, they’re all filtered through someones preconception of what products should be. Sometimes the preconception is better than what apple comes up with, sometimes not.
Yeah, we don’t get everything, but some stuff usually leaks, like Siri did with the 4s.
Already, we know there’s gonna be some new map stuff shown off tomorrow, along with some hardware refreshes. Or so goes the rumors
Really? For years? That revolutionary Moto ‘iTunes phone’ that they unveiled in 2005? Apple has had many stabs at making a phone, it wasn’t until the 3G (and with that adding native app support) that something nonâ€beta existed.
Stop abusing the term revolutionary.
The original iPhone was considered beta?
Marklar wasn’t really a secret. It was in plain sight: the OS, the build tools and the drivers were always out there in Darwin. The initial releases of what was to become Mac OS X, codename Rhapsody, were always available also as Intel builds and PPC actually came in later builds. As Mac OS X was released (even in beta), due to the popularity of Linux and OSS in the late 1999 dot-com boom, Apple made Darwin available. It was (and in my opinion it still is) a PR stunt.
The only things missing from Darwin were the OSX user land and some accelerated video drivers. Vesa FB drivers were always provided as an example driver. Mac OS X for Intel was ALWAYS a cross-compile away for some apps and 90% was always there, the 90% that was hardware dependent known as XNU.
In order to get from Darwin to OS X on Intel they had to write accelerated video drivers for the cards in the Macs and just recompile the non-BSD user land for x86. The kernel was continuously publicly available in x86 flavour with the BSD userland and the compiler (GCC) always produced x86 code. That’s 99% of the porting work and it was public.
Relevant quotes from wikipedia:
So, the story should be summarised as: manager amazed that bored engineer was able to recompile a apps and libraries.
Many stories get embellished with the passing of time.
The foundation of OS X was derived from NextStep which was already capable of running on the X86 architecture when Apple purchased Next.
Bringing OS X onto the X86 architecture likely meant starting from the same original base and applying/porting the changes made for the PPC. Not a small feat in it-self for a one-person team.
Some dads can be quite creative when it comes to providing the best environment for their children. A good thing too that his manager seemed to have some discretionary funds he could apply to such not-a-priority project.
The really only odd bit in the story is that Steve Jobs would have taken a flight to meet with Sony the next day after the demonstration. It would be weird that he would have entertained a venture based on licensing OS X for Intel given that one of his first actions back at Apple was to stop the hardware clones.