If you read certain articles on the web you might be under the impression that Apple has had a secret project to port OSX to the ARM-based architecture with the intention of producing a cut down (although not necessarily very cut down) Macbook Air running on the ARM architecture.
Which is preposterous.
Firstly this secret project to port OSX was merely bringing up the ‘lower half’ of OSX (Darwin) on a particular variety of ARM-processor. The end result ? Probably something more or less equivalent to a “login” prompt on an old multi-user Unix system with no GUI. That is not to underestimate the accomplishment of the student involved – in many ways that would be a good 75% of the work involved.
But a few key facts here :-
- This is not the first port of Darwin (or even OSX) to the ARM-based architecture. Pick up your iThingie … that’s got an ARM inside, and whilst we all call the operating system it runs iOS, it is really OSX with a different skin on. Sure there are some differences and limitations, but they are merely skin deep – at the lowest level they’re both Darwin.
- If there’s a secret project to run OSX on an ARM-based laptop of some kind, this ain’t it. Take a closer look at the processor used in this experiment. It’s an ARM processor less capable than that in the very first iPhone. You won’t see it in any new laptops. If this secret experiment had any real product behind it, it would be more likely to be an intelligent embedded device – a really clever fridge or something (and no, not a TV).
- If there was a real product behind this, it seems pretty unlikely that Apple would choose a student on work experience to do the work. After all such a student might just spill the beans on a secret project given enough green folding stuff as incentive.
What is probably the case here is that Apple came up with this project for the student as a way of testing whether he was worth considering as a full employee – after all it is a better way of testing a potential employee than asking them to make the tea! And have no intention of using the result as a product.
What they will do however is use the student’s observations to feed back into the OSX team – what problems did he encounter that might qualify as bugs ? Etc.
In reality, Apple probably already has OSX running on ARM based machines in their labs. It’s an obvious thing to try out given that all their iThingies are ARM based, and it is not an enormous amount of extra work to finish off what is already in place to get something that looks and runs like OSX. After all, Apple did ages ago admit that early versions of OSX did run on x86-based processors when their product line was all PowerPC based, and keeping OSX portable across architectures is something they probably want to keep as a possibility.
Will Apple launch an ARM-based Macbook Air ? Not anytime soon. Whilst the value of a 64-bit architecture is over-rated, it would seem unlikely that Apple will ever again launch a 32-bit based “real” computer. But with 64-bit based ARMs arriving in a year or two, who knows ?