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by schrototo 5444 days ago
> I suspect the PC-ness of current Macs would be offensive to him and he being on board would be our only chance of seeing an elegant x86-based computer, ever.

In what ways do you find the iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Air et al. to be inelegant or PC-like?
1 comments
rbanffy 5444 days ago
Every x86 box has, unless I am very wrong, an ISA bus buried somewhere in the chipset. Deep down there, you may find a functionally complete IBM 5150 PC. I wouldn't be surprised if, somehow, you could trick the video hardware into emulating a CGA (or an MDA text mode).

If you ever had the chance, take a look into the schematics of a 5150 and compare how clumsy, inefficient and plain inelegant it is when compared to a years-older Apple II. Then you will fully understand why I hold x86-computers in such low esteem.

And yes, I am typing this on a x86 laptop. I'd love to have an option.

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philwelch 5443 days ago
It's no secret that x86 is an inelegant architecture. There was no shortage of RISC CPU architectures in the 90's designed to dethrone x86. Windows NT was even written to run on two of them (DEC Alpha and PowerPC). Apple and IBM carried this experiment forward the longest, but it didn't work out that way.
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rbanffy 5443 days ago
No it didn't because economies of scale took their toll. Still, it would be possible to build an elegant Mac around an x86 processor, but Apple would have to design and manufacture their own chipset. Nothing would make the CPU elegant, but, at least, the rest of the computer wouldn't be this mess.

But then Macs wouldn't be able to boot Windows. When that becomes irrelevant, we may see change.

Minor nitpick: Windows NT has been ported to MIPS, PPC, Alpha and Itanium, and was originally developed for the Intel 860 (though that version was never sold). Legend says there were Intergraph Clipper and SPARC ports too. If Microsoft pulls off the ARM release of Windows 8, that will be one more architecture with a Windows NT port.

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