14 DAY TRIAL // A hack has uncaged Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard from the Apple proprietary platform and is migrating the cat to the PCs. The successor of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, initially planed for the end of spring, but pushed back to October, a trade-off to the iPhone, gave Windows Vista a window of opportunity to grab a consistent volume of market share, before it stepped into the wild on October 26. And although the Wow fell somewhat flat, Microsoft still revealed that it has shipped close to 90 million Vista licenses worldwide in the operating system's first nine months since it hit the shelves in January 2007.
Now in the last quarter, ended on September 29, Apple revealed that it sold 2,164,000 Macintosh computers, up 400,000 shipments compared to the previous quarter, which is synonymous with a growth of 34%. The ascendant trend will obviously only gain momentum with the availability of Leopard. But at the same time, Leopard's growth is limited by the fact that Apple is a closed down environment, producing both the software and the hardware. Microsoft is estimating that by mid 2008, the install base of the Windows operating system will pass the 1 billion milestone. And there is a close equivalence between the Windows install base and the PCs acting as platforms for Microsoft's operating system. Basically, an immense resource that Apple is completely ignoring.
The Cupertino-based company has permitted the transition of 32-bit and 64-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista onto Macs via virtualization solutions, at the same time offering Boot Camp for the x86 versions of the two Microsoft clients, but it has been shy of permitting the adaptation of its OS X cats outside of the native Apple hardware habitat. However, OSX86Scene has managed to train Leopard to integrate seamlessly on an Asus P5W DH Deluxe powered by an Intel Core Duo processor, via a hack.
BrazilMAC described on OSX86Scene in minute detail the method necessary to implement in order to build a bootable Leopard installation disk that will enable the users to deploy Mac OS X 10.5 on a PC, the native Windows platform. But just as Apple has not hesitated in the least to brick hacked iPhones, the same will probably be the case with the experiment involving making Leopard available on the PC.
"Why run Mac OS? Well, when you are just used to Windows, it is like living inside a house and not experimenting the whole world out there. Once you get out of it, it is just amazing. Mac is just that: You just feel like glued to the computer. Everything is just beautiful, the interface, the stability. Once you experiment it, you don't want to go back to windows. Trust me," explained BrazilMAC. "And one of the things that really got me involved with all this was the ability to have a system that benchmarks [better than] the Mac Pros. You can build your system for a lot less than a real Mac and get the performance of a top-dollar Apple machine. This is fact and a lot of the real Mac users will deny, but it is fact."