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Originally Posted by fryke I guess you wrote this thread for all of those who want to install OS X on their beige boxes (the "any PC"). I have to admit that I perfectly understand the wish to do so. Heck: Even *I'm* sometimes dreaming of buying one of those little subnotebooks, because Apple doesn't make them. |
It is mainly to make sure that people aren't going into these endeavors blindly.
And to let people know what is considered
crossing the line from Apple's point of view.
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Apple should actually create a demo-DVD of Mac OS X which _does_ run on many PCs.
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That sounds very much like what Be tried to do with BeOS Personal Edition (I think that was what it was called), which ran off a disk image (something like 400 MB) on Windows PCs. You could boot into it and then restart to get back to Windows... or something like that.
Beyond the fact that it didn't work for Be (and I'm not saying that this was the reason Be failed), I think that people actually need a certain amount of investment in something like a platform change.
For example... why in the world would people who could have afforded a Mac stay with MS-DOS? What I found was that these people had invested time and energy learning DOS and didn't want to feel like they wasted it (I've seen the same stance taken by command-line using Unix users and hand-coding web designers).
Another example... Me... and education. When I was in high school the only thing that kept me in class and getting a passing grade was Track. If my GPA dropped below 2.0, I was dropped from the team. I graduated with a (weighted) GPA of 2.03. Only what I needed to stay in Track.
But a couple years later, when I started college, even though I was on the Track team then, I was paying for school out of pocket. All of a sudden a class wasn't something to skip... it was something I paid for!
Honestly, paying for a Mac is the only real way to get most people motivated enough to get the most out of a Mac. Part of what I do for a living is to help people get the most out of their investment in an Apple computer.
The mystery gets them to put the money down. Putting the money down gets them to put the effort into the transition. That effort shows them not only what a Mac can do, but in a lot of cases, what a computer can do (a lot of people sleep walk through using a PC as they started with them).
I think that if people could prevews Mac OS X on their own systems, that would be enough for them to say they tried it and didn't like it.
On a side note... I own a couple versions of the BeOS. Other than trying out the BeOS Personal Edition on a PC at work back in 1999, I have yet to take the time and effort to actually install the BeOS on any real hardware.
The mystery was gone... and so was the incentive to try to work with it. The only reason I have the media at all is for my OS collection (odds are, if I would have had to pay more than I did I might have been more inclined to see what I paid for).