apple moving to x86

[Stephen Hurd]

David Kelly wrote:

> Think possibly I didn't speak clearly enough. Apple is not *adding*  
> commodity-ness to their product line. Thinking about it I'd bet part  
> of the deal with Intel is a special crypto block or similar in the  
> CPU uniquely identifying it as an Apple Blessed CPU. Apple does this  
> very thing with disk drives. Originally Apple SCSI drivers would only  
> format and configure Apple-blessed drives. Currently the same thing  
> holds true for internal CD/DVD drives. But put the same non-Apple  
> drive on Firewire and MacOS is happy with it.

You must be dealing with an older "originally" than I.  I've replaced 
the 40MB HD in an SE/30 with a 700-oddMB IBM one from a PS/2 with no 
issues.  Ditto for a pair of uh... *goes and looks* IIci macs.  Are we 
talking way back when Apple didn't use standard SCSI-1 (Which, I think 
is because there was no formal standard)?  May as well complain that you 
couldn't replace the "non-standard" 800k floppy with a "standard" 720k one.

> The only AGP/PCI video cards I know of which work in a Mac are the  
> Apple-branded ATI's, but can't say I've been shopping lately. Once  
> Upon A Time I totally failed to convert a Matrox Millennium to Mac  
> service, even with Matrox software. Adaptec PCI SCSI cards certainly  
> can not be made to work in a Macintosh without major work, one has to  
> purchase the specific Macintosh version. PCI ethernet cards often  
> work on MacOS X due to those who "abandoned" BSD to work for Apple on  
> Darwin.

More often than not, this is a driver issue, not a hardware issue.  
There's lots of PCI video cards I've never seen work in a Sun system 
either.  Adaptec doesn't have the worlds best reputation for allowing 
people to write drivers (or even for writing non-buggy firmware) but I 
seem to recall that the Macs that ship with SCSI support use an Adaptec 
chipset...  oh, on looking, it appears that the IIci uses an NCR SCSI 
chipset... specifically, the 5380 which was found on many commodity PC 
SCSI cards too.

> Mouse, keyboard, and most USB devices work right out of the box on  
> Macintosh.

Thank goodness, since the stock ones are so terrible.