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

["Austin S. Hemmelgarn" <ahferroin7@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2016-07-26 08:06, Simon Hobson wrote:
> 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.
They're not even reverse engineering, all the stuff they use that is 
also used in regular PC's is either an open standard (PCI, SATA, most 
other similar things), or is a commonly available piece of hardware. 
The designs are similar not because one is stealing ideas from the 
other, but because the design constraints are functionally identical.
Put another way, it's like if you go to three different civil engineers 
and ask for a design for a suspension bridge.  While it's likely none of 
the designs will be identical, they will almost certainly use almost the 
same materials, have very similar dimensions, and probably look similar 
too, because there's only so many things you can change before it's not 
a suspension bridge anymore.
> 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.
Actually, most laptops, and quite a few OEM desktops do have a TPM these 
days.  A lot of the things that differentiate Apple hardware are due to 
them integrating new technologies before anyone else.
> 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.
Many vendors do this, some (Lenovo immediately comes to mind, although 
not with hard drives) even refuse to boot if you use unsanctioned 
hardware, although the smart ones only do this with stuff like batteries 
and expansion cards.  The official argument for this practice is to be 
able to provide better customer service, because the hardware 
configuration is within a known set of parameters.  That's probably part 
of the motivation behind Apple's requirement to use OS X only on Apple 
hardware too.
> 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.
Based on recent experience, I'd say they aren't all that much more 
reliable.  On top of that, there's a lot they solder directly onto the 
MB instead of using standard connectors, so it's also a lot harder to 
upgrade or fix a system.
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