Today I confirmed what we -- technology afficionados -- knew since forever: Apple is going to invade the PC shores. It feels like the D-Day.
It´s like watching some JFK-like conspiracy movie. But it´s real life altogether. Steve Jobs has done it again: he blew our minds into pieces.
Let´s rewind back to 1997 a little bit. The prodigal son returns back to Apple after a departure of a decade, expelled from Apple by its former CEO John Scully. Since the late 80´s he´s been trying hard with NeXT but utterly failed to convince the market that the Unix-based NeXT Operating System was what they needed. Pity, it is still one of the best crafted systems ever. But it was not a technical problem, it was a business one: the system was too much ahead of its time.
At that time Apple was struggling with losses after losses and an entire community waiting for innovations that never came to be. With Jobs, the NeXT technology was brought into Apple. A new era begins. The almost bankrupted Apple rebirths to the covers of several Times magazines.
Several candy colored iMacs and Titanium notebooks later, we got to 2001 and the so awaited release of the brand new Apple operating system. A complete departure from the 1984 MacOS aging heritage architecture. They revamped the NeXT OS, brewed several layers of Apple coolness and voilá: Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was released.
Back at that days, we already had it figured out: the core of the new OS was a Mach based platform designed from the ground up to be platform agnostic. NeXT started in the old days of the Morotola 68000 processors and after failing there they tried the Intel x86 market, failing again. But with so many effort they realized an efficient platform independent OS.
After Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther and now Tiger, we got the news at the Apple World Wide Conference of 2005: Steve Jobs tagging along with Intel´s Paul Otellini at the same stage in front of hundreds of Mac Zealots. Heresy! They were confirming the rumors: yes, the Mac OS has been living a double life, since its inception. Every new release of the system already was Intel compatible, since 2001.
Amazing! Jobs called it the "in case scenario". What a strategy. They justified the switch from the award winning IBM PowerPC processors because of their less aggressive roadmap ahead for the platform. So Apple chose the better "performance-per-watt" Intel Core Duo system. People scratched their heads in disbelief.
Today Apple is already successful with their new lines of iMacs, MacBook Pros and MacMinis, all of them powered by Intel Core and running "Universal Binaries". Newbies probably never heard of NeXT sollutions for platform independency called "Fat Binaries" (Linux guys should learn that one). Every application is an encapsulated container that packages the binaries for every desired processor: PowerPC G4, G5, Intel Core. So, as a developer, I need to deploy only a single package to the market. The end-user doesn´t even have to go on the trouble of choosing the right package: he downloads a installs one and the OS figures out which binary within to run. Elegant and amazing sollution that Linux people still didn´t fully realize.
Good. Now we have an environment of old PowerPC based Macs living together in harmony with the newest Intel based systems, all of them running Universal Binaries. But the community is restless. So, now we all have Intel based processors within our machines, running along side with generic NVidia and ATI graphics card, standard SATA HDs, PCI slots, and so on and so forth. So much like an ordinary PC.
Why can´t we install Windows XP then? We actually can: the OSX86 already made a hack a few days ago that proved just that. But they still have a problem: installing a bare bones OS is easy, lifting it up to its full potential is another. Without proper drivers, the Windows XP installation over Intel based Macs was doomed to be not more than a curiosity.
April, 1st 2006, Apple celebrates its 30th anniversary.
Fast forward, April, 4th, Apple announces Boot Camp, beta release. An incredibly easy to use piece of well crafted software that installs a boot loader manager and a bunch of official drivers so you can install and run Windows XP with its full speed!
Astonishing! So we can now understand that all this "less aggressive roadmap of IBM", "performance-per-watt" was business crap for journalists. The real intentions are showing up now: this release would not be possible without an Intel processor. They are going after the PC market in their own game. A bold move.
Now we still have news ahead of us: the next release of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, is very promising. Rumors are circulating about two things: the partnership with Parallels to ship its virtualization technology with Leopard. That would mean running Windows on top of Mac OS without the need to dual boot (something like VMWare). Maybe Boot Camp would be just a migration tool for that matter.
The other rumor is that they could possibly restart over the "Yellow box over Windows" project. They would aim for the unimaginable: instead of trying to make Windows software run on top of Mac OS (the open source community are trying just that for years with the Wine project, without considerable success), they would do just the opposite: taking Universal Binaries to a new level, making it run Mac OS applications on top of Windows itself!
So, Yellow Box represents a complete set of Cocoa and even Carbon APIs that maps down to Windows API calls. So a developer would not have to worry about porting and maintaining his application between Mac and Windows: he would fire up XCode on a Mac, click "compile" and voilá: Universal Binaries for PowerPC based Macs, Intel Macs and even generic Intel PCs running Windows XP. And don't forget: Cocoa API is OpenStep API at its core, and this API set has been migrating to Windows for quite some time now. It is far more clever than the Wine approach: instead of aiming for a moving target (the Windows APIs) they would do the other way around.
That plan would probably take 2 more years to be fully realized, and finally close a cycle that started back in the early 90´s, with NeXT foundation. This would bring down the last barrier for all the hordes of PC users that are secretly dying to run a Mac but cannot afford to lose their legacy or Windows-only applications. With Boot Camp now and Leopard going to show up by mid-2007, we can have very high expectations.
Personallly, I think that this sequence of events brings the Linux desktop (not the servers!) efforts down to irrelevancy. Mac OS X is already a Unix-based modern operating system with robust and stable API sets. It is what every Linux distro dreams to be. Ok, it doesn´t run Linux as its kernel, but so what? It already have the support of all major open source projects as Apache, Eclipse, and so on and so forth. At every open source conference we can see hackers coding around using Apple notebooks! It has become "cool" to hack code using Macs nowadays. Every good programmer loves Mac OS X, no question in that.
As a matter of fact it also makes the Windows Vista release utterly irrelevant. We don´t need it: we already have all of its features in Mac OS X Tiger today. We can stop upgrading it and run legacy applications on Windows XP, dual booting on Intel Macs, and wait for the developers to start migrating their source code base into XCode projects so they can recompile them into Universal Binaries. Let´s just hope that the Yellow Box rumor is correct. It would be the biggest news in decades, maybe only comparable to the 1984 original Macintosh release.
Steve Jobs shall surprises us again. And the conspiracy theories goes on.
