I went on and wrote a review about MacOSX 10.0.4 a month ago, but it was never finished as I had to fly to France for my own wedding. I came back and MacOSX 10.1 had been released. I scrapped completely the old text, as 10.1 brings some more speed and new features to the system, and restarted writting the review from scratch.A month ago I used a friend’s iMac 500 Mhz G3 with its RAM upgraded to 256 MB. It came with MacOSX 10.0.4 pre-installed. For the current review I used another friend’s iBook (latest model) upgraded to 384 MB of RAM and with MacOSX 10.1 installed. This series of MacOS usage during the past month was the second one in my life. The first time was back in 1998 when I used to work for a graphics design Studio and all the computers in the office were some extremely slow Macs (only myself and my boss had PCs in the whole company). My opinion back then was that either the OS was pretty bad or the hardware was just too slow. Or both.
I left MacOS in its own fate, until 2 months ago where I installed the BasiliskII emulator, running MacOS 8.1 for 68k under Windows. Funny that it ran faster under emulation in my 533 Mhz Celeron than in its original machine. And then two of my housemates bought an iMac and an iBook respectively. And I discovered MacOSX.
MacOSX is a (supposedly) modern 32-bit OS, based on the 15 year old BSD4.4 and Mach kernel, with a new, object-oriented GUI on top. Sounds familiar? Yes, NeXTSTEP was exactly the same. Not surprising, as Apple has purchased NeXT in 1996 and Apple’s today’s CEO is Steve Jobs who created NeXT too as well as Apple. While MacOSX is Posix compliant, its GUI API uses Objective-C and/or Java. There are these who say that Objective-C is superior to C++ and these who say that is not as flexible and advanced as C++. Well, there is always Java too. I just hoped that the developer tools would included in one of the CDs that come with the machine instead of searching all over Apple’s web site to find a free downloadable version.
MacOSX looks good (I said “looks good”, not “feels good”). The graphics UI designers at Apple have done a good job, but at places feels “too much”. Transparency where it is not needed making text sometimes unreadable, too much of a gradient in the scrollbars etc. All in all, it looks very good though and the GUI is consistent, but not without its problems. First off, I can’t say that I like the classic Mac menu bar on the top. It prevents multitasking from doing its job as it supposed to do it and it does not necesarrily make the system easier to use, as it probably made sense back in 1984 when the first Mac was introduced. Then, I still can’t figure out how to move files from the Desktop to ~/ using the Finder (the MacOSX file manager). Believe me, the context menus do not always work. I don’t know if it is a bug that I hit or me being unable to figure out “the easiest OS to use in the globe”, but it just didn’t always work for me. The other problem I have with the GUI, while it is a fact that it is looking good and consistent, it does not offer any revolutionary new concepts.
The OS is a unix underneath, so if you are familiar with Linux or BSD, you are going to love the ability to have a powerful shell in combination with a GUI that makes sense as opposed to the inconsistent XFree and its accompanying offerings. Setting up Apache, SSH, mySQL is even easier than other traditional unices, as you can find packages that can get installed through the MacOS .bin.hqx method rather than manually using the command line. There were a number of reports recently about security holes in the OS itself, but Apple has been releasing patches frequently since March, which was the original OSX release date. The integration between the BSD unix and the GUI has been done cleverly, older MacOS users will not even notice that they run on top of a unix environment.
The OS comes with several applications, like iTunes, office software, IE5.1, QuickTime and a DVD player (which plays exceptionally fast and without glitches I should add) among others. MacOSX also comes with a copy of MacOS 9.2 which, when called, it runs as a runtime environment on the background of OSX and provides compatibility with older MacOS apps that they have not being carbonized yet (not using the new API yet that is), like Photoshop and Quark 4 for example.
There are already a large number of native applications for MacOSX found on VersionTracker today and this number is increasing every day.
The biggest problem is that the system is big and slow. Yes, the 10.1 update made the system faster, but not fast. My previous review for OSX, based on an older and slower version was pretty much a grave for OSX’s speed. Things have changed to the better, but not a whole lot. WindowsXP still feels faster in common usage (closing down IE or openning the Trash directory for example). Resizing Finder in column mode is now… possible, but still with lots of lag in the response. When comparing this performance to the BeOS, which can resize or do everything needed while the system is already under the pressure of lots of CPU usage, MacOSX makes me laugh. If this is the “next generation OS” that Apple was talking about for years, I am not very imperessed, at least speed-wise. At places the OS seems that it lacks even proper multitasking. I am dissapointed by the general response time of the OS.
Also, the price for purchasing a Mac that can run this OS a bit fast (and make sure you fill it with extra memory if you want to have some luck with it) is too high. Apple hardware was always expensive, but if Apple really wants to gain more users off the PC platform (and these people will mostly be *nix geeks who seek a better gui than XFree), the price for the hardware should be dropped to something more realistic (have you seen how much Apple charges for an extra 128 MB DIMM?)
I was ready to buy an iMac for me some months ago, but I have now reconsider that doesn’t make much sense to spend $1,300 USD for something so underpowered (600 Mhz G3 – and please don’t give me the “megahertz myth”, which is pretty valid, but not so much in Apple’s case) and for an OS that except of a slick GUI does not bring anything new in the OS and technology scene, but just a life boat for Apple as a company in the whole. Nothing like a filesystem like XFS or BFS, not a good software manager like QNX’s, or the advanced (and easy to use) networking features that WindowsXP brings.
MacOSX lacks not the killer application, but a set of killer features.
Still though, MacOSX is in my opinion, the only OS that can compete head to head with Microsoft’s OS offerings one day. But this day, is not today.
Overall: 7.5/10
Unix, Linux, OS X, etc. all include raw sockets. The difference is that they are truly multiuser OSes. XP is not. It is not like Windows 2000 and NT (which also have raw sockets).
There is nothing wrong with having raw sockets if they are on a secure OS. XP is not so. It is like 95/98/ME out of necessity for backward compatibility.
So I’m afraid Pffff that you are the fool.
Shame on all the intolerant, monoglot English speakers and their incessant whining over spelling and grammar (my personal favorites are when someone whines about Eugenia’s English when they themselves can’t form a proper sentence).
When you can write a column in Greek with no mistakes, then perhaps Eugenia would like to hear from you. Until then, lets be a little more understanding.
>MacOS X can’t compete in terms of applications.
>MacOS X’s UI is not really more usable than Win2k or XP (IMHO).
>MacOS X is much slower on comparable hardware than Win2k or XP.
Well all three of these above statements are very funny indeed…. thanks for the laugh, you always know how to get the crowd going YC!
As for trying and working with various OSes of the kind, my profession allows me to work with all sorts of gizmos including a different array of OSes. Now I can say that I have not tried Windows XP, but have played with Windows 2000 and I do not find Windows 2000 much different from NT in respects of performance… stability maybe, but not performance. I use PCs that have similar hardware specs to my Mac at home and I laugh at your comments because the Compaq DeskPros we have at work (which is the worse PC I could ever disgrace myself to compute on) are either running Pentium II’s or III’s with 400MHz and run almost twice as slow as my Mac at home running a G3 400MHz… I do believe in the MegaHertz Myth, but I will stop short of saying that it is not always the hardware, but the software as well! Lets take BeOS for example… you put BeOS and Windows on the same machine and you will not get the same performance… BeOS will win everytime, hands down. I know this I run BeOS beside Windows NT at work for fun and my co-workers are amazed by this. It is ashame that BeOS is almost dead, hopefully BeUnited’s campaign will bring it to a new reality (let’s hope so)!
This will probably be my last confrontation of the OS Wars that will never be won by anybody. Microsoft, Sun, Apple and whatever you like Linux will never be the supreme of the OS world. Windows maybe be dominant in the great ole US of A, but there is a whole other world out there too, and I am not American bashing, I’m an American as well, but living all over the world has given me a different perspective and that is why I laugh at this whole Microsoft thing now… it is really all a joke if you ask me!!!
I’ve read a review about Mandrake Linux 8.1 on Adequacy.org that’s quite similar in style to this one. Is this supposed to be a parody too or is it just a terrible review?
I’ve written “Quartz-CPU” not dedicated G3. Why not throw some hardwired logic onto Quartz? Why shoudln’t this compete to GeForce/OpenGL?
>>>>>>
Let’s see what a “Quartz CPU” would do. It would accelerate alpha blending, vector drawing, color correction, rotation, scaling, shearing, and transforming. There’s no need for a “Quartz CPU.” Something that does this stuff already exists. Its called a 3D card. The only two operations done in Quartz that aren’t supported by commodity 3D hardware are decomposing Bezier curves into line segments and color correction. Neither are really problematic, since the first is quite simple and fast to do (about two pages of code, runs really fast on my old PII-300), and the second is a lot of software management primarly. Note, OpenGL wouldn’t replace Quartz. It would simply make Quartz into a high-level display manager and allow the 3D card to do the grunt work of the rendering.
Sure it can draw fonts. But is the result equal to Quartz?
>>>>>>
Okay, let me explain how TrueType works. The TrueType font is stored as a series of points connected by arcs, plus some hints. The font manager (Freetype or FontFusion, for example) decomposes the arcs into a series of line segments that are sent to the lower-level drawing hardware. The hints are used to make the font look nicer by overcoming rounding errors. For example, a hint could say that both sides of the dash on a ‘t’ should be the same length. This step of the font rendering process, converting the font into a series of arcs, has nothing to do with either Quartz nor OpenGL. Its done by the font engine (btw, FreeType is easily equal to OS X’s TrueType engine in quality). Now, given the outline, the font should look the same no matter how its rendered (ie. it is the font engine that determines the quality of the fonts, not the display engine). On most systems (including Quartz), the arcs are rendered in software, and all of the anti-aliasing is done in software as well. If you need to rotate the font or whatever, you have to use the CPU to do it. With OpenGL, however, you could just pass it the line segments, and you’d not only get rotation/scaling/translation done for free, but you’d get cool effects like textured letters or gradient-shaded letters. Entirely useless features of course, but they’re free, so why complain?
I remember that PDF is a device indepented technology. This is why PDF will help a lot for “ClearType” thing. They just need some calculations for rendering sub-pixels.
>>>>>>
OpenGL is device independant too, and it also does sub-pixel rendering. However, neither PDF nor OpenGL do diddly for ClearType. ClearType relies on manipulating pixels at a very low level, which neither PDF nor OpenGL are designed to do. That’s the work of the really low-level renderer.
Maybe because of the Objective-C underlying messaging and threading?
>>>>>>.
Umm, Linux thread’s are better than Mach threads (much more flexible and take less time to context switch). Also, Linux has fast messaging as well.
I can speek of WO 4.5 on MacOS X and NT 4 . You can’t develop WO 4.5 apps on Solaris or HP/UX.
>>>>>>
No, my point was that both Darwin and FreeBSD expose a POSIX API to the application. Thus, WebObjects would work just as well on either kernel. In other words, there is nothing, technically, that Darwin can do that FreeBSD or Linux can’t.
> Let’s see what a “Quartz CPU” would do. It would accelerate alpha blending,
> vector drawing, color correction, rotation, scaling, shearing, and
> transforming. There’s no need for a “Quartz CPU.” Something that does this
> stuff already exists. Its called a 3D card. The only two operations done in
OK. With the “Quartz”-CPU I imagined something like giving an PDF to the accelerator and let it handle alone without further main-CPU involvment. Maybe this doesn’t make sense, and if, those chips would cost to much (given Apples market share and unit count).
> Note, OpenGL wouldn’t replace Quartz. It would simply make Quartz into a high-
> level display manager and allow the 3D card to do the grunt work of the
> rendering.
Lets assume you’re right. The question remains if using OpenGL isn’t an overhead compared to a more direct API. Another issue seems to be the buffering for alpha blending. There is already a compression mechanism inside Quartz to speed up things. So another question would be, if this is faster then giving an OpenGL acceleration board uncompressed bitmaps.
I could agree with you, that having an OpenGL card with huge amounts of RAM (i think of 128 MB up 🙂 would be the best…
Gotta love Windows XP with its activation code and all of their .NET/MSN advertisements all over the OS. Wheee…Just wait till you guys run the final Windows XP and not that craked/no-avtivation version.
Hi,
What is the Windows emulation like? Can it run say red faction as well (preferable better) than my C466, 256Mb, Voodoo3? as one day I’ll have the money to buy a new computer & I’d like to buy a Mac.
Next can I change the cartoon-y l&f for something, well, nice 😉
Also how stable is it? After using BeOS and (dare I say it) Windows 2k, I really can handle anything less.
> One can sort of do this with Windows, using hacked versions of Apache and PHP and Tomcat, But OS X runs the real thing. <
Now I have tomcat running on my Windows box, and I’m very curious by what you mean by hacked.
> Ever try to REALLY delete a program from any MS operating system? Did you get rid of every stinking file left over? <
For most apps
Add/Remove
deltree [drive]:\program files\[app folder]
works. OK, not as neat as it should be (just add/remove, which works for a good deal of apps).
I really enjoyed the review. Thanks for you point of view Eugina!
I have been using different versions of MacOS for many years, but ended up using Linux on x86. Problably because of expensive hardware and lack of free development tools on the mac side. And these problems are not really adressed yet.
Virtual PC 4.0.6 on MacOS X is about 4 times slower for the same MHz on a G3.
This sounds worse – but it is only if you need raw computing power, say in while compiling or rendering things or 3D games.
On a G4 it is better, on Seybold they’ve shown AutoCad running in reasonable speed.
But, always ask yourself: why do you need an emulation?
If you’ve an “legacy” application which is bound to Windows and there is no counterpart on MacOS, it is OK. Mostly those Applications wait for the user (wordprocessing etc.), so speed is no issue. One time I even used Premiere to render an AVI – this was slow but since I had to do it once, VirtualPC was cheaper then buying a Wintel-Box for the job.
Some words about the stability of VirtualPC: there is no difference. If you could maintain a wintel setup, you’re virtual PC setup will be running fine too. It is even better: you could have as many different “boot”-partitions as you like (one windows for premiere, one for experiments) which could run at the same time! Just take a look at http://www.connectix.com .
In case of mlk I would go for MacOS X, use the really different applications there (there IS NOTHING LIKE OFFICE:MAC FOR X!), and KEEP the PC-Box for games etc. .
About development tools: there ARE free development tools for MacOS X (at the Apple Developer Connection) for Cocoa and Carbon. Classic development was long time free with the Metrowerks CodeWarrior. Now CodeWarrior costs only some bucks, but with this license you can’t do any commercial development and the binary output size is restricted. But anyway: the new, really stunning art of programming is Cocoa with Apples tools.
OK. With the “Quartz”-CPU I imagined something like giving an PDF to the accelerator and let it handle alone without further main-CPU involvment. Maybe this doesn’t make sense, and if, those chips would cost to much (given Apples market share and unit count).
>>>>>
It really wouldn’t make sense. There are two parts to any graphics API, management and drawing. Putting the drawing part in hardware results in huge speed increases, while putting the management part in hardware rarely improves anything. OpenGL already supports most of the drawing parts of Quartz, so there would be little to be gained by putting the rest on the GPU (graphics processing unit).
Lets assume you’re right. The question remains if using OpenGL isn’t an overhead compared to a more direct API.
>>>>>>>>
Not really. Direct APIs are passe these days. For example, newer display cards really don’t like their framebuffers to be accessed directly. What new hardware is designed to do is accelerate fairly high level tasks. Take an example from 3D. In the old days, you’d get the coordinates of a cube, calculate the rotations, break it into triangles (all on the CPU), and then finally send the triangles to the GPU. These days, you just send the coordinates, and any rotation/scaling commands, and let the hardware do the rest. While there is initially some extra overhead in administration, its far outweighed by the fact that you can allow the hardware to do the bulk of the work. Besides, the proof is in the programs. Quake III is 10X more complex than any desktop would be, and runs at over 100fps on the newest cards (at 1600×1200 I might add).
Another issue seems to be the buffering for alpha blending. There is already a compression mechanism inside Quartz to speed up things. So another question would be, if this is faster then giving an OpenGL acceleration board uncompressed bitmaps.
>>>>>
I don’t understand. Compression would slow down the drawing process, not speed it up. You can’t alpha blend until you decompress the image. Also, while it could be problematic to ship large window-sized textures to the GPU, its not as much of an issue as you’d think. First, most games already use huge (512×512) textures. Second, with AGP-4X and its 1 GB/s pipe to the GPU, bandwidth isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be.
I could agree with you, that having an OpenGL card with huge amounts of RAM (i think of 128 MB up 🙂 would be the best…
>>>>>
You don’t even need that much. First, most OpenGL cards can already compress textures (although you probably wouldn’t want to for a window!) Second, not all the graphics have to be sent to the GPU. With AGP, the card can use textures directly from main memory. In fact, most windowing systems do this anyway, since they use the blitter on the graphics card to do scrolling and window moving.
OK. With the “Quartz”-CPU I imagined something like giving an PDF to the accelerator and let it handle alone without further main-CPU involvment. Maybe this doesn’t make sense, and if, those chips would cost to much (given Apples market share and unit count).
>>>>>
It really wouldn’t make sense. There are two parts to any graphics API, management and drawing. Putting the drawing part in hardware results in huge speed increases, while putting the management part in hardware rarely improves anything. OpenGL already supports most of the drawing parts of Quartz, so there would be little to be gained by putting the rest on the GPU (graphics processing unit). Lastly, a 64MB GeForce2/MX (which would run a Quartz desktop really, really fast) is only $50 on pricewatch.
Lets assume you’re right. The question remains if using OpenGL isn’t an overhead compared to a more direct API.
>>>>>>>>
Not really. Direct APIs are passe these days. For example, newer display cards really don’t like their framebuffers to be accessed directly. What new hardware is designed to do is accelerate fairly high level tasks. Take an example from 3D. In the old days, you’d get the coordinates of a cube, calculate the rotations, break it into triangles (all on the CPU), and then finally send the triangles to the GPU. These days, you just send the coordinates, and any rotation/scaling commands, and let the hardware do the rest. While there is initially some extra overhead in administration, its far outweighed by the fact that you can allow the hardware to do the bulk of the work. Besides, the proof is in the programs. Quake III is 10X more complex than any desktop would be, and runs at over 100fps on the newest cards (at 1600×1200 I might add).
Another issue seems to be the buffering for alpha blending. There is already a compression mechanism inside Quartz to speed up things. So another question would be, if this is faster then giving an OpenGL acceleration board uncompressed bitmaps.
>>>>>
I don’t understand. Compression would slow down the drawing process, not speed it up. You can’t alpha blend until you decompress the image. Also, while it could be problematic to ship large window-sized textures to the GPU, its not as much of an issue as you’d think. First, most games already use huge (512×512) textures. Second, with AGP-4X and its 1 GB/s pipe to the GPU, bandwidth isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be.
I could agree with you, that having an OpenGL card with huge amounts of RAM (i think of 128 MB up 🙂 would be the best…
>>>>>
You don’t even need that much. First, most OpenGL cards can already compress textures (although you probably wouldn’t want to for a window!) Second, not all the graphics have to be sent to the GPU. With AGP, the card can use textures directly from main memory. In fact, most windowing systems do this anyway, since they use the blitter on the graphics card to do scrolling and window moving.
First, something on topic : The review is not worse than a bunch of reviews I read so far. Neither on arstechnica nor anywhere. I used OSX not extensively, although we got a Mac Veteran here for our few (left) Mac-Customers. I watched him carefully working and screaming around OSX ;-).
<P>
Personally speaking, OSX is a very aesthetic GUI ontop of a solid OS ;-).
<P>
The lacks are more basic, which Eugenia offered us quite brightly : No revolutionary OS Improvements – more – some of the best benefits of the BSD where mangled in order to keep the System stable, according to the insufficient performance of the GUI-Layer. A mess. The Filesystem : archaic – no journalling, no 64bit at for an Y2K-Brewed OS is pretty LOUSY.
<P>
Even although a lot of us know that OSX is still at the 50% of that what it will be sometime (where BeOS already was 😉 : it is a weak presentation, Steve.
<P>
To all your wrong thinkers : Mrs Loli-Quéru isn’t a Windowed Lady – in fact her background is more geeky than you guys might believe : http://www.bebits.com/app/2332
<P>
As an old-fashioned BeOS-User at my average work at home with an crappy Dual PIII@1GHz, I belong to those Dinosaurs, who got all the nifty geeky thinks OSX (hopefully) will get within the next years. My OS is dead, it plays no DVD’s, nor OGG’s (if you know what that’s good for it), it captures no Windows Media Files nor any other mp3 Radio-Stream from the Internet. I’m not able to manipulate .psd – Images. I can’t capture videorecords from my Sony DVD via FW nor via BT878. It is very lumpy in handling files nor I can open any .doc/xls. – Files. I can’t rip 20 Aiff-tracks to mp3 simultaneously with no lock, nor I’m able to burn cd during that rip !
<P>
Funny : for comparing the Quality of different (but same) QT-recordings, I still get all the QT files from my mac-technician to compare it on a beos-machine. Cause 6 QT – Movies played simultaneously still SUCKS on Mac…
<P>
Sorry folks for my ironic tones : like I said before – from a Dinosaur’s sight…..
I was surprised by this review. I was previously a Windows and Unix/Linux user with little Mac experience. I recently purchased a iBook and installed OS X 10.0.2. As a Unix fan I was suitably impressed. I later updated to 10.1 and was even more impressed. I now consider OS X my favorite OS.
<P>Some of Eugenia’s comments confuse me. To move to your home directory use Option-Drag. The Developer tools come with the retail package of OS X, though not with a new machine. Her comments about the menu seem more a personal preference. Having just started to use them I find them quite intuitive and find Windows/X-Windows menus “foreign”. Actually, I’ve adopted a lot of Mac practices to my use of Windows/X-Windows.
<P>I do share one of Eugenia’s complaints. While 10.1 is faster, it should be faster yet. And I have a complaint of my own. As a programmer who codes on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, I convinced by Mac-loving boss to let me port our product to OS X. Many of the system level calls such as threads and semaphores follow an older BSD-style standard and not a SVR4 style, which made the port more difficult than it should have been. And Apple’s documentation is lacking.
<P>Overall though, I’ve been quite happy and anxiously await more applications ported to Mac OS X. I don’t see myself switching back anytome soon.
You have made the most sense in this whole discussion… I work around the same OSes and have the same attitude as yourself!!!
The problem with keeping my old box is, well it’s on it’s last legs.
One of my CPU’s has died, my g/c is on it’s way out (Dx no longer works, OpenGL has slown down).
>But, always ask yourself: why do you need an emulation? <
* Red Faction
* EPOC Developent
Not a big list I know… 😉
Your review of Mac OS X 10.1 is that much Microsoft-biased that I’d like to suggest you go to Redmond immediately and give this insane jerk Steve Ballmer a blowjob. By the way, this ugly fool would be a perfectly matching mate for you, given the fact how you look, poor stupid.
Although no computer professional, I have worked with all flavours of DOS, Windows (including W2K) and Mac OS as well as BeOS to know the advantages and the drawbacks of all these operating systems.
W2K is as rock-solid as is Mac OS X 10.1 but its multi-tasking capabilities are much worse than Mac OS X’s. Mac OS X 10.1 runs smoother.
I personally would prefer the completely dead BeOS that I consider the most advanced personal computer operating system. However, BeOS is already history, leaving just Mac OS X as the best of all current operating systems for desktop computers.
Windows will soon decline because it’s terribly vulnerable to TCP/IP attacks, Trojan horses and myriads of virii. Microsoft will cease to exist within the next five to seven years. Many IT departments have already decided to go away from Microsoft and its Internet Information Server bullshit.
So honey, don’t forget the blowjob you should give this dancing ape at Redmond!
Yours truly,
Angelique Pottham Du Vert
Currently, *any* comparison of OS X vs. Windows XP is apples vs. oranges. Why? It’s the *underlying hardware*. OS X (specifically, Darwin/x86) requires so much Intel-only hardware (and I’m talking Intel *brand* hardware here) that it might as well be a closed box (or a Mac, which is, perhaps, the point). Windows XP, right now, supports much more hardware than Darwin/x86 does.
Surprisingly, even FreeBSD outdoes Darwin/x86 in the hardware support department (and kicks serious Darwin butt in the application department).
If you are going to compare Darwin (especially Darwin/x86) to *anything*, it should be a BSD variant (either FreeBSD or NetBSD).
I do have some serious suggestions regarding what the Darwin team should do in the way of actually improving Darwin’s application base, though:
1. Widen the hardware support of Darwin/x86 so that it matches, at a minimum, NetBSD (if not FreeBSD). This way, you’ll have the *entire* BSD community ready, willing, and, in most cases, *able* to port stuff to Darwin.
2. Open serious discussion with Microsoft about making all future OS X/Darwin applications processor-neutral. This completely tosses the need for direct hardware access out the window (and is one of the historic strengths of BSD applications).
3. Barring processor neutrality, include translation software as part of Darwin (not just for enabling older 040 software to run on Darwin/PPC, but *all* Darwin/PPC-native software to run on Darwin/x86).
Even if Apple has no plans on selling OSX/x86 (or derivatives thereof), there is no reason why Daemon News (or existing Darwin volume sources such as Cylogistics) couldn’t relieve Apple of this chore. (Plus, it also provides a backstop should Apple go under for any reason.)
Apple didn’t nearly go broke (twice) because of MacOS. As someone that runs Windows XP (and MacOS via the Basilisk II 68K emulator), I can safely say that, given enough hardware, MacOS (even the 7.5.5 that I have running in B-II) runs decently (I have B-II emulating a 128 MB Quadra 900, which was a high-end Mac in its day). The biggest problem is that OS X has a higher price of entry than Windows XP Professional does right now (even if one bought the non-upgrade version of XP Professional and an over-engined P-4 or Athlon PC with 256 MB of RAM and a 60 GB hard drive, it would *still* cost less than a similarly equipped OS X Mac), and that is *entirely* Apple’s fault.