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Originally Posted by ballistic
Of course Apple wouldn't want that to happen and they would probably use a hardware encryption scheme tying each OS X installation to a specific iPod among other things.
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I was specifically calling (probably) false on the download-able thing. The rest is unlikely, but possible...
Really unlikely.
Making it download-able and tying it to a specific iPod would be near impossible. And the other thing is, once one person has cracked it, that'd be all it'd take for Apple to lose out on the biggest revenue they have - the hardware. Of course even just going to Intel processors is a risk, but they might not even use BIOSes for the Intel Macs, meaning it'd be
quite hard to actually crack that... Plus there's the fact that OSX running on Apple hardware quite possibly will have some
specific ties into the hardware, but once you have it running on normal PC hardware, that's not possible. iPods are, after all, just normal external hard-disks when it comes down to it.
And then there's also the implausibility of Apple taking the time to develop drivers for many pieces of not-so-common hardware. That's one reason OSX has the 'experience' of being so simple and flawless with hardware - Apple controls it. The moment they allow OSX onto 'commodity' hardware, is the moment that reputation will be, at the very least, hurt, if not shattered. At least if someone cracks Intel OSX to run on normal hardware, any problems will not be Apple's fault - they can blame it on the fact that it's not
meant to run on anything other than a Mac. But as I said, if they want it to run on normal computers, they lose that reason rather quickly.