http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/13/1746234&from=rssAnd there you have it.
It sounds to me as though Jobs simplified to the point where
everybody could "understand" it. (But if you actually want to know something that isn't a nonsensical riddle, go look somewhere else).
As we seem to know, the iPhone runs on an ARM processor.
As we definitely know, Darwin (OSX's kernel) does not run on an ARM processor.
...And, if the thing
does run on an ARM processor but Apple hasn't released the source, they are in big trouble.
Not sure if I can take Steve Jobs seriously in that case :(
So, my bet is that the iPhone is running your standard ARM binaries in a tightly integrated way - about the same as the firmware on something like the PSP or an iPod - without much thought actually put in to being an "operating system".
It just /looks/ like Mac OS X.
Oh yes, and it's also unlikely to be OS X because... what moron ports an entire operating to a tiny, soon to be obsolete cell phone just to wow a crowd? (Especially when it's only 1st-party support anyway!).
Battery life: Okay, with a desktop operating system there are files being read and written continually. There is a swap partition. There is a ton of garbage that does nothing except unnecessarily drain the precious battery, which as we should all know is already not very long-lived even in a more normal modern cell phone. (You know: The kind that doesn't run an entire operating system?). They could turn most of it off, yes, so that point is irrelevant. Still a point, though.
Where is the operating system? You have an 8 GB hard drive; why would they waste precious space with the entire Mac OS X? Or is it on the little bit of memory holding the firmware?
Another thing that people surprisingly haven't mentioned is how it is extremely unlikely that Mac OS X has support for multiple pointing devices.
I could be wrong, but multi-touch is a rather unexpected input mechanism and there's little with support for it.
I expect that it is unlikely to have Mac OS X's native window manager there, because with a multi-touch interface you need to be able to control many windows at once!
Multiple windows need to have focus at the exact same time, prompting numerous API changes. (GetActiveWindow, for instance, would be very different).
Then the changes under the hood... would be horrifying!
Okay, they
could get away with limiting GUI interaction to single inputs at once, but every userspace program gets the mouse pointer info with the same API calls. With a regular touch screen, it doesn't matter that you aren't using a mouse because it is a single input.
With a multi-touch screen, though, there again needs to be a way to select /which/ pointer you want the position of!
It's still possible that they tore apart chunks of OSX until it ran decently and yet kept it somewhat resembling its original form. After all, they've been working on it for a long long time.
Even so, it certainly won't be an enjoyable process to get Max running on there, even if you do get past Apple's baby gates.