[alrs]

There's always a hedge afoot. Apple had OS 7 running on Intel as early as 1992.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

[stuaxo]

System 7 on top of DrDOS... If only this could be released somehow, its an amazing bit of history, a copy has to exist somewhere.

[duskwuff]

I would be shocked if Apple didn't have macOS running on some ARM development systems internally. It's not even that much of a stretch -- both systems use nearly the same kernel, and the iOS userspace runs on x86 as part of the iOS Simulator.

[fnord123]

afaik there is no ACPI with ARM so it's non trivial to setup an ARM system that has modular hardware as we take for granted in the Intel world. Maybe they went through the trouble and are keeping it under wraps. Or maybe not.

[astrodust]

NeXT had an Intel version as a hedge as well. Seems those two projects were destined to merge together.

[pvg]

That was actually their product rather than a 'hedge' for a while.

[astrodust]

It started out as a hedge against their own hardware being an impediment to sales, then ended up being their entire business. I guess it was a good hedge to have!

[protomyth]

Considering they had NeXTSTEP release versions running on x86, PA-RISC, SPARC, and its original home 68000, they did pretty well. I do wonder why the MIPS chips were ignored.

[rvense]

Maybe SGI didn't want to play ball...

[protomyth]

Probably, but it just seems rather odd since MIPS had an open system spec and Windows NT had been ported to it.

[ams6110]

Not just Intel but PA-RISC and Sparc as well, in addition to M68K.

[rthille]

Also Moto 88110 RISC processors (though those NeXT products never saw the light of day...)

[Tanegashima]

More than that, NeXTSTEP 3.3 and later did really release to the public for Intel x86