Originally posted by: Nothinman
I proposed to 'add' the x86 platform in their coded releases.
Then who would buy a PPC box?
Not me. I would do what all the other close minded, biased little pricks are doing and buy a Dell (because that pothead on their commercials is |<-R4D d00d), hack it, and put OS X on there (illegally downloaded of course).
x86 has 3 things going for it:
1. It's cheap.
2. It has more processor power than the whole of ATOT has had dates.
3. It is what most ignorant children, non-tech folks, and CEOs think of when they hear the word computer.
Just to inform you all, the ones that may not know anyhow, that there are things besides x86 out there.
Sun makes some nifty little machines. I highly recommend their sunfire line. And as far as longevity goes, I still have a SparcStation 10 in working, and usable condition.
HP makes their own processor! Well, they won't be in the near future because of the Itanic, but they had the cajones to make their own platform at one time. That's the high end stuff by the way, I think you can find the smaller stuff on your own. If not, PM me.
HP also makes one of the neatest platforms out there. The link looks funky, but hopefully it brings you to the right place. Before the Pentium 4, before the Athlon, before even the P!!!, there was the Alpha. Once considered one of the best processors for crunching those numbers we know everyone loves to crunch (because Distributed Computing projects are geeky, and geeky is well, not cool, but good enough for some of us). But because of cheap computers and short sighted freaks, and definitely a few problems on the home front, the Alpha has plummeted to an EOL product at best. Thanks, we can continue with close to no innovation as long as you can raise the mhz rating 50 more points by this time next year. And in case you did not know, the EV6 bus the current Athlons enjoy was blatantly licensed from DEC/Compaq/CompaHP/Intel or whoever happened to own the Alpha and its parts at the time. The EV78(?) bus current (or new?) Alphas enjoy is supposed to be pretty kick ass, much to the chagrin of HPompaq.
SGI is another one of those "We make computers too!" companies. I know what you all are thinking, Pixar uses Mac OS X! But SGI made some solid and sexy machines.
Now, what do these higher end machines, and the Mac we have come to know and either hate or love have in common? Yes that's right! They don't play games very well. So when Johnny is at home and he can either study his English Grammar homework or play the latest game (First Person Shooter with no originality, shady graphics, non-existant plot, scantily clad women you must either save or shoot with big guns because you are a manly man and you think backhair is sexy 7!), why would he want to do something other than flip burgers for the rest of his miserable life? Play the game!
Wait, that's not where I wanted to go with this. My point was that these are not just hardware platforms. They are the entire platform. Solaris is free (beer) if you have a small enough machine (and how many of us have 8+ processor Sun machines lying around the house? Atleast, I think its 8+...). HP-UX was designed *around* PA-RISC. IRIX is a champ on SGI's MIPS machines. Tru64 (is that the current name?) takes advantage of quite a bit of the fun parts of the Alpha platform. And Apple's OS X comes with modern Apple Macintoshes. To put it simply, you aren't buying a bunch of parts and throwing them together. You are getting a piece of engineering art, put together and tested laboriously by men and women in bunny suits, while nerdy guys sit in the next room and hack code out all day (except at Apple, they're probably almost normal over there...). But instead of platforms where things have been worked out, tested, and heavily thought out, and not just from the hardware stand point, or just the software standpoint, but from the user's standpoint.
You don't think Steve Jobs is doing a good job at Apple? Buy enough stock to get another moron in there. Maybe we can have more Apple clones so someone can finish the job of burying Apple. Jobs only resurrected the hurting company from the dead (and a little help from Microsoft). He doesn't know squat.