Surfing around my various news sites this morning, I happened to come upon this little bit of info. It seems that the x86 version of 10.4 is already on the web. Do you think this is nothing unusual or some gimmick by Apple?
And no, this is not a rumor...
I would say that this is totally expected as you can already get most versions of the mac os from various sources on the internet and I guess somebody somewhere in the world's going to post it
Although, having said that it is possible that Apple have leaked it to give a "try before you buy" experience to PC useres who have been thinking about the mac but never taken the plunge but I think this is unlikely from a company that won't let you have any of the classic OS after 7.6
Joel
I have a feeling that it's isn't truely out *quite yet*. I can't find it on any of my sources, and they're fairly thorough. Not to condone piracy, but I think that this may be a tactic by Apple to 'hook' people on OS X.
There has only been one, unsubstantiated at that, source for all this supposed info: http://www.shapeofdays.com/2005/06/mac_os_x_on_int.html
Besides the fact that he states that someone tipped him off to the fact that it is there there is no proof, and no one that I have talked to has seen any evidence that such a leak exists. No doubt it is likely to happen due to the huge amount of interest, but any evidence remains to be seen.
The article mentioned above is a nice op-ed, albeit choppy and frankly not written very well, in that it is an interesting take on things. But seeing as no one has actually seen any proof I don't understand why so many are immediately spreading the rumors that it has been released.
Also what the majority of people have seemingly missed is that there are no magical x86 Tiger install CDs shipping with the dev systems, instead it is pre-installed. Which means any leak on the part of devs would be simply an image of the hard-drive. Thus any install cds in fact would have to be released by apple, or a source within apple, assuming they even exist and a network install is not used.
Furthermore any x86 Tiger released at this point would be crippled, much like beta releases of any apple OS, in that it cannot be upgraded or patched beyond its original state.
So yes. If the install cds were leaked it would probably be on the part of apple. But why would they want to? The average computer user will find no real use for it. Sure it would be a short novelty, but in a year, by the time intel macs are released, all novelty would have worn off, thus if anything hurting sales. And for the more experienced user I don't really see how it would be anything but a short novelty: there will be bugs, issues with hardware, lack of driver support on anything other than the dev systems apple is shipping, etc.
Yea, I do agree if it was out there it would be horribly handicapped. Still, a interesting bit of news though.
Well, there is a file called Mac OS X WWDC Beta on torrent sites...which does download. It is a .dmg disk image and about 1.4Gb.
... it's likely crippled indeed. Or if it was leaked outside of Apple's knowledge, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of hidden "beacon" built into the OS that calls back to the Mother Ship when it's connected to the 'net so that Apple knows how many systems are out there running.
There was a torrent making it's way across the networks, but that is a certifiable fake. Let's just say that it was nothing but a program with a rather explicit image, and not Mac OS X.