Was browsing Emerging Earth, which led me to Rick Segal’s blog. Turns out that Apple has been dropping subtle hints about adopting a new chip for their portable devices - one that decreases battery life -but optimizes performance to the level of .. well .. a personal digital assistant.
The Portal Player is a 16bit chip and has proven itself as a solid performer for the main applications of a portable media device (music, photo’s video), and Portal Player is releasing a new chip with improved video performance. The Samsung chip is a 32-bit chip based on an ARM design. This will of course result in decreased battery life, and I didn’t really see what was to be gained.
Then I was struck by the possibility that they could run OS-X on a 32-bit ARM with very little changes to the OS. Though I haven’t come across much data about Unix running on an ARM, I have run across some details of Linux running on ARM devices so I don’t think it is a huge step for OS-X to make that jump. Look how quickly they made the jump to x86.
Wow native OSX on the palm of your hand! This only leaves us with more things to ponder on:
1. The time of the portable music player will soon be gone? It;s just how all mobile phones manufactured today CAN play music and shoot pictures. It would take a company like Apple to tip the market via way of uber cool design, making consumers demand for PMP’s instead of sole music players.
2. Palm will OEM and release the Palm 700m which will run Mac OSX natively, with a Palm hardware design.
3. I’m going to die with a silly grin on my face.
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