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There are lots of things happening in the mobile devices department right now. Speaking of Apple - they are about to release their first touch screen tablet computer, a mixture between iPhone and laptops. They have this "Codename Cocktail" thing going with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group to create some kind of extended, digital "Music Album". More is coming. Yesterday I saw a newcomer mentioned in a Freescale newsletter, Isabella Products, with some similar product. A whole new category of digital life style products could be upon us - bigger and ahelluvalot more feature rich than small media players and phones, and at the same time a lot more mobile than laptops. And it's all about ARM, only ARM makes it possible.

You speak about Apple, but they have their own OS and software, and they are building a whole ecosystem (and an Industry!) of little applications, widgets, media and services around this. But other (smaller) potential manufacturers that would want to enter this market lacks all this, which is an entry barrier for them. It's a new, unoccupied territory for OS's. There is a gap between the traditional embedded OS's and the traditional desktop/server OS's, and I think MorphOS (EDIT: or indeed AROS) *could* bridge this gap, since it's as lean and resource efficient as many of the embedded OS's, but offers a lot more than these OS's traditionally does, features that stretches quite far towards the desktop side. Here is MorphOS's strength IMHO, and if the MorphOS team has any commercial ambitions whatsoever, I think it's in this area (the "new mobility") they should focus. And if so, then ARM is the way to go.

If they on the other hand consider MorphOS to be a serious commercial competitor on the desktop OS market (or the server market for that matter), then x86 is the logical way to go, so they at least can compete with Windows and MacOS on the same terms (Hardware wise at least, if you look at OS features and SW applications, then you'll realize what a poor option MorphOS would be here, but at least it would be on the same HW arena).

Only if they forever will consider MorphOS to be nothing more than some hobby of theirs, something you dedicate a rainy afternoon of your free weekend when you are feeling bored, only then does it make sense to continue the PPC only route. If their ambitions aren't higher than that, then they can as well spend the next decade porting MorphOS to every single old PPC Mac model out there, because then nothing matters anyway.


[ Edited by takemehomegrandma on 2009/8/27 17:40 ]