MacRumors writes:
A few rumored changes could be positioning Apple for a transition to sell OS X for generic PCs:
- Changing .Mac to Me.com (platform neutral)
- OS X Leopard (not Mac OS X Leopard)
- 10.6 to be Intel only (dropping PowerPC would be necessary)
- “No new features” in 10.6 could be due to resources devoted to just making 10.6 “PC compatible”
and they add this photo:
Back in 2001, Jobs was very vocal about the name of the operating system being ‘Mac OS X (pronounced ‘ten’) and there were corrections made when individuals dropped the ‘Mac’ part of the name.
I think the main change in thought came with the release of the iPhone. Calling it iPhone OS 2.0 is technical, iPhone OSX sounds poo. I don’t think that Apple is ‘removing the Mac’, I think we’re just seeing some consistency in the branding especially as Apple have indicated that the operating system in the iPhone and iPod touch is going to power all of their handheld iPod devices.
So, we now have ‘OS X iPhone’ and ‘OS X Leopard’ on banners at a developer conference. These are not meant to indicate marketing messages. I think it’s unlikely that Apple will offer OEM deals with third party PC makers but they may open the licensing of Leopard so that individuals and companies may put Leopard on their own hardware.
However – with Apple’s focus on design (and the fact they have grabbed 66% of the high end $1000+ PC market) it seems very unlikely to me that they would endanger that by allowing individuals to reproduce a Mac on a cheap piece of hardware. Apple was bitten on this before with the Mac clones back in the 90s – it almost killed them.
I can’t honestly speculate on anything regarding 10.6 because, frankly, it’s a little early. I find it ridiculous that Apple would have gone to all this effort to make the OS universal and then one version later dropped PPC support. I think we will see PPC support continue to 10.6 but I’m doubtful it will go further. Apple has a history of supporting ‘the old way’ for 5 years. It’s what they did with Classic and it’ll be what they do with PowerPC. That said – we’re 2.5 years into those 5 years now – and Leopard is less than a year old. If we had Leopard for two full years, we’d not be far off the 5 year limit so 10.6 might end up being an Intel-only release after all.
As for the dropping of Mac.com and the replacement with Me.com – that’s pretty clever really and indicates to me more that Apple will be offering their online service to iPhone and PC users as well as just Mac users. That makes sense as PC users could very easily avail of some of the current .Mac services considering they already have iTunes, Quicktime, Safari and iPhone.
The changes we’re seeing are purely marketing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
