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iPad with Snow Leopard
- Thread starter prnoct90
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Don't think it'll happen... soon, anyway. No doubt someone will hack it eventually.
There is no way the A4 will support it, and if you could get it running it would be slower than a 5 year old PC.
It is not possible in practice. Snow Leopard is compiled to run on Intel x86 CPUs. The iPad has some kind of ARM CPU. The only way to run Snow Leopard (and any of its apps) is to either emulate an x86 CPU or dynamically translate the x86 instructions to ARM. Either solution would require so much of the iPad's resources that OS X and any of its apps would be unusable.
This has been discussed several times already. Use MRoogle to find those threads.
Mac OS X is now using the X86 architecture, therefore it is written for that.
The iPad's processor uses another architecture (ARM), and unless someone rewrites Mac OS X to use that ARM architecture, there will be no Mac OS X on the iPad.
Mac OS X is now using the X86 architecture, therefore it is written for that.
The iPad's processor uses another architecture (ARM), and unless someone rewrites Mac OS X to use that ARM architecture, there will be no Mac OS X on the iPad.
It is.
And not even dumbed down, but just a bit stripped down with a new UI. But it is compiled and running on a completely different CPU architecture. Sort of like the difference between a metric and English toolbox. All the tools look the same, but they aren't interchangeable.
You could potentially modify SL to run inside an x86 emulator on an ARM CPU, but that would run on the order of 100 to 1000 times slower.
Below the GUI layer, iPhone OS and OS X are extremely similar*. The key issue is just that Apple has compiled iPhone OS for ARM vs. OS X which is compiled for Intel x86. Compiling is the process of going from source code to executable code. It would be relatively easy for Apple to produce full OS X for the iPhone or iPad if they really wanted to (easy compared to what it would take for someone without all of the source code).
*which is why it is annoying to read people complaining that Apple should have "just made a version of OS X enhanced for touch screens like the iPad" They already did!