Back when Steve Jobs announce to the world that they're switching to Intel processors, the people were in shock when they find that the OS X that was shown during the keynote was running on Intel hardware. Well, a lot weren't all that surprised by this news all things considered. But the notion that developers are going to get their hands on Intel-based hardware to code on, that raises the age old question as to when it'll be leaked.
As expected, the developer disc was leaked as well as some modifications to the base install hard drive image. And people started trying the OS out... like me.
After some minor hackery and modifications as documented by many people, I was able to finally get a usable dekstop going. Unfortunately, there's little I can do considering the platform I was using (my Pentium-M has no SSE3 support). Safar (their web browser) crashes at various websites. And Firefox has yet to be built into Universal Binary. Updating Safari didn't help, as I incidentally crippled it. Not wanting to continued fixing what was broken, I wiped the partition clean and put my Windows image back into the system. But during the time I was using OS X on my x86 laptop, the OS performed unlike anything I have ever seen. Effects and transitions were all perfect, with minor bugs due to hardware differences. It's amazing how accelerated graphics can make a difference in usability.
Having used OS X for a bit, I feel that Microsoft is in deep trouble. While Windows Vista is developing along, the hardware requirement for OS X is very modest and minimal. It ran with all the effects on integrated chipset hardware, something that Vista is likely not to be able to support or handle for full effects. If the Mac hardware is cheap enough, then perhaps I'll be looking towards to owning one... Maybe...
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