How could Apple fight against OSX x86 hacking?

While the launch date of the first MacIntel is getting everyday closer, we keep asking ourselves how Apple will manage to protect its OSX system from hackers who will look for solutions to install OSX x86 on non-Mac certified PC.
If you look at It history, it is quite clear that fighting against the wind does not help much, whatever protections Apple will install, there will always be a solution to run OSX x86 on a standard PC; it is only a matter of time, and motivation (meaning that the price difference between MacIntel and similarly equipped PC will be big)
So how to prevent such a move?
- Apple can sell its OSX x86 to PC users, but if this possibility can indeed become true in the future, for a short-term period it remains unlikely. Indeed, it would imply a direct fight with the dominating PC OS: Windows, in other word, a direct fight with Microsoft, a company with a financial strength leaving competitors in the dust.
- Apple could release a time- or features-limited, or even demo version of OSX x86 to PC users in order to convince them to migrate to MacIntel; but it would also make hackers’ work easier in their goal to turn such limited version into a full features version.
So despite of using a brand new and robust protection system ready to resist for months and requiring weeks of work for hackers to crack it again for every system update; Apple has to find other ways to make OSX x86 more attractive when used on a MacIntel than when used on a PC; without starting an opened competition with Microsoft… not an easy task for sure.
But there is a solution. And one has to go back in Apple’s history, and more precisely at the time when Apple bought NeXT. To build MacOSX, Apple has been using OpenStep that was then renamed the « Yellow Box » and further evolved to become Cocoa as we know it today. At that time, the Yellow Box was compatible with Windows.
Now if you consider that Apple has been developing OSX x86 in parallel to all OSX PPC versions, one could easily think that the same thing could have been done with the Yellow Box. If one keeps going with this hypothesis, it could imagine Apple to deliver a developing environment compatible with Windows, and able to run Cocoa-based application.
This solution would have many advantages:
- It would give a « taste » of OSX to PC users, without providing the entire foundation parts of OSX.
- It would make installation of a cracked version of OSX x86 useless, and potentially instable, at least as unstable as XP in some cases.
- It could attract Windows developers who could really make Mac AND PC software easily.
- And finally it could convert PC users after being using OSX applications via the Yellow Box to migrate to MacIntel. It could be even more efficient than an opened fight against Microsoft.
Of course such hypothesis remains purely speculative, but it is part of our current though with the future MacIntel planned for 2006, and potentially early 2006.
TO learn more about the Yellow Box: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaOverview/Articles/CocoaHistory.html