Re: [Xen-users] Xen and OS X.

[Simon Hobson <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jason Long <hack3rcon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<a large amount of untrimmed and unquoted material> Please trim what you reply 
to !

> If you mean about unique hardware is that Apple use special Hardware then you 
> wrong. They reverse engineering PC motherboards and make their own 
> motherboards and thus their hardware slots and...must different from PC but I 
> mean is that Apple use Nvidia or Intel or AMD for VGA, Kingston or corsiar 
> or.. For RAM and... and all of them are PC :)

You have no idea how people design hardware. One thing Apple will NOT be doing 
is reverse engineering other products to design their motherboards. They will 
be working with full tech specs from the vendors (eg Intel) - and almost 
certainly having access to information and design assistance that isn't 
available to the likes of your or me. They may well be doing some reverse 
engineering to see how others do it and find some ideas to use, but even then I 
think you'd find that they'll go back to the design tools and do their own 
implementation.

The only part of your comment that is true is that they do use many common 
parts which are also used in other systems. But they do have some features that 
aren't common across the industry - again parts bin engineering, but (AIUI) 
most PCs don't have a TPM module for example.
But everything they produce is (in terms of form factor) custom to them. So 
back when they still did tower machines, they didn't use any common physical 
arrangement (eg ITX case/MB) - making it impractical to do repairs with 
anything but their own spares (hence the comment about expensive). For some 
systems, notably the current iMacs, the drives may appear to be standard hard 
drives, but with customer firmware - have a search and there's lots of people 
found that replacing the hard drive causes the fan to run permanently at full 
speed. BTW - I've seen HP do this trick as well.

There is one other thing. In general (over the years) I've found Apple systems 
to be generally more reliable than PCs. That's not to say they don't have 
faults - often very annoying and "they did what ?" type of faults - but back 
when I used to support a mixed environments we found that the Macs lasted far 
longer than PCs (both in terms of hardware packing in, and in terms of still 
being usable). From what I've read, this may well not be the case any more - I 
don't have enough recent experience to comment, although my current laptop is 8 
years old and the main reason I want to replace it is to get support for more 
than 8G or RAM.
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