5 ms·

Which raises an interesting question....this may sound extremely farfetched, but what if we took the "dongle" concept to its logical conclusion? The Intel Comp

Which raises an interesting question....this may sound extremely farfetched, but what if we took the "dongle" concept to its logical conclusion? The Intel Compute Stick already exists; what if Apple sold its own compute sticks with macOS installed on them so that way one could have a portable macOS experience? In a way, we already have this, already in a much less compact form: the Mac Mini. Ever since its introduction in 2005 the Mac Mini has been marketed as a device where you "bring your own keyboard, display, and mouse." It was always intended to be a drop-in replacement for a PC, kid of like today's Intel Compute Sticks and Intel NUC's. A PC "dongle", if you will. But imagine if this "dongle" could be connected to a PC that could boost the power of the Mac Mini, which is necessary for some users since the Mac Mini is (sadly) not user-serviceable? If it's possible to offload the computation of a Mac Mini to a PC, then it's possible to treat the Mac Mini as a macOS dongle. It may not be the ideal solution, but I'm sure that Apple would charge near-Mac Mini prices for licensing macOS to PC users if Apple ever opened to the idea. It's a farfetched idea, but it may provide additional options for macOS users who don't want to switch to Windows or Linux.

saagarjha 8y ago
Apple doesn’t want its software running on hardware it doesn’t control, period.
- sjwright 8y ago
  My dream product from Apple would be a bare "Mac" in the form of an mATX motherboard paired with a macOS license. They could even make it very clear that they won't offer AppleCare or full Genius Bar service for it—a product for developers, hackers and gamers who are willing to self-support.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    I'd like that too. Thing is, how does Apple prevent something like that from cannibalizing their other sales? The most obvious choice would be pricing them high enough (think: nearly as much as full Mac) so that nobody could profitably build and sell Mac clones. The second most obvious choice would be to release them in such low quantities that nobody could base a Mac clone business upon them. But that would just result in them going for a billion bucks on eBay and you'd probably wind up paying more for one than if they just picked the first strategy. The third most obvious strategy would be to cripple them in some obnoxious way so that they couldn't compete with Macs and were useful only as hobbyist devices... limiting them to 1GB RAM or something. All those strategies would suck for, well, you and me. One posssssssssible option would be to release a hobbyist iOS board. Sort of like all those hobbyist Android boards from China. It's a lot less likely that you'd be able to craft a "hobbyist iOS board" into something that could possibly compete with an iPhone.
    - sjwright 8y ago
      One way to restrict sales would be to require the sale to be performed via the Apple Store app on the customer's iPhone, with a limit to the quantity purchasable on a per-iPhone-per-year basis. Not offering any kind of general product support (other than required for warranty support) would also be a significant inhibitor for many people.
  - jonhohle 8y ago
    In the G4 days you could do that through authorized distributors who would sell you the boards directly as “replacement parts”. It was completely possible to build your own beige box Mac running on a real Apple board.
gorbypark 8y ago
I think the logical conclusion is that your iPhone becomes your portable mac desktop. iOs is a modified version of macOS, there are rumours of Apple potentially switching MacBooks to Arm, along with the "merging" of macOS and iOS apps that's also apparently in the pipeline...I can't see how Apple isn't planning to offer a phone that can connect to a keyboard/mouse/monitor to offer a desktop experience. I'm sure it will require a very expensive dock, maybe even with some computing offloaded to it (eGPU, extra cores, etc), but I'm confident it's coming!
auslander 8y ago
> licensing macOS to PC users Never gonna happen. Mac's are very secure, performant and polished exactly because Apple controls its hardware. Done right because they can. Amen :)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

saagarjha 8y ago

Apple doesn’t want its software running on hardware it doesn’t control, period.

sjwright 8y ago
My dream product from Apple would be a bare "Mac" in the form of an mATX motherboard paired with a macOS license. They could even make it very clear that they won't offer AppleCare or full Genius Bar service for it—a product for developers, hackers and gamers who are willing to self-support.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  I'd like that too. Thing is, how does Apple prevent something like that from cannibalizing their other sales? The most obvious choice would be pricing them high enough (think: nearly as much as full Mac) so that nobody could profitably build and sell Mac clones. The second most obvious choice would be to release them in such low quantities that nobody could base a Mac clone business upon them. But that would just result in them going for a billion bucks on eBay and you'd probably wind up paying more for one than if they just picked the first strategy. The third most obvious strategy would be to cripple them in some obnoxious way so that they couldn't compete with Macs and were useful only as hobbyist devices... limiting them to 1GB RAM or something. All those strategies would suck for, well, you and me. One posssssssssible option would be to release a hobbyist iOS board. Sort of like all those hobbyist Android boards from China. It's a lot less likely that you'd be able to craft a "hobbyist iOS board" into something that could possibly compete with an iPhone.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    One way to restrict sales would be to require the sale to be performed via the Apple Store app on the customer's iPhone, with a limit to the quantity purchasable on a per-iPhone-per-year basis. Not offering any kind of general product support (other than required for warranty support) would also be a significant inhibitor for many people.
- jonhohle 8y ago
  In the G4 days you could do that through authorized distributors who would sell you the boards directly as “replacement parts”. It was completely possible to build your own beige box Mac running on a real Apple board.

gorbypark 8y ago

I think the logical conclusion is that your iPhone becomes your portable mac desktop. iOs is a modified version of macOS, there are rumours of Apple potentially switching MacBooks to Arm, along with the "merging" of macOS and iOS apps that's also apparently in the pipeline...I can't see how Apple isn't planning to offer a phone that can connect to a keyboard/mouse/monitor to offer a desktop experience. I'm sure it will require a very expensive dock, maybe even with some computing offloaded to it (eGPU, extra cores, etc), but I'm confident it's coming!

auslander 8y ago

> licensing macOS to PC users Never gonna happen. Mac's are very secure, performant and polished exactly because Apple controls its hardware. Done right because they can. Amen :)

deleted 8y ago
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