We cant install Mac OS on PC but ..

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Hi ranchers.
I want to ask a question, I know the answer but I don't know why.
Mac OS is compatibale with Apple and all other OSs are compatible with IBM PC.
This means that we can't install Mac OS on our PCs, but why ?
I mean Mac OS is just a software not special piece of hardware or a chip.
thanks.

[M Beck]

because of special hardware and chips.

PCs and Macs use different kinds of processor chips - CPUs - which, due to that, run different kinds of machine code. also, all the surrounding hardware (motherboard chipsets, memory controllers, external busses, bus controllers, and so on and so forth) are different between Macs and PCs; the operating system needs to compensate for this, too.

now, operating systems can, at least in theory, be designed to compensate for differences even greater than this. some ones have been so designed - there are versions of Linux that run on Macintosh hardware, for instance - but Apple Computer, Inc., has chosen not to so design MacOS, for reasons of their own.

[Simon Brown]

Just to add some more here, you can always run an emulator on your Wintel box to emulate the PowerPC processor. Take PearPC for example. Emulators are typically pretty slow, but it's an interesting project that means you can attempt to install Mac OS X on your PC.
[ March 09, 2005: Message edited by: Simon Brown ]