Speaking of subjects that refuse to fall down dead and stay there, one of the most beloved of Zombie Rumors is that of Mac OS X for Intel. It takes a couple of different forms, of course; some variants claim that Apple aims to ship a boxed version of the operating system for Wintel owners to install on their x86 systems in place of Windows, which others simply insist that Apple will switch to x86 chips in its own Macs. And even when you can't find people swearing that one or both of these interesting situations is a done deal and a matter of weeks away from a formal Apple press release, you can't spit skyward these days without your loogie landing on somebody who contends that something like this should come to pass, for the benefit of Apple, its customers, and humankind at large.

Well, guess what? Mac OS X running publicly on Intel iron has finally happened-- although not quite in either of the aforementioned forms. Faithful viewer Josh Santangelo alerted us to the progress of the open source PearPC project, which aims to bring software emulation of the PowerPC architecture to other platforms-- including, unsurprisingly, Windows on x86. Think Virtual PC, only in reverse and not having been gobbled up by Microsoft. The upshot is that anyone with a suitably fast chunk of Wintel hardware would theoretically be able to download and install PearPC for free, and then install a regular boxed copy of Mac OS X in the emulation environment, just like Mac users can run Virtual PC and install just about any x86 operating system.

"But wait just a finger-lickin' moment," you protest. "What about the way that Apple always ties its operating system to a proprietary Mac ROM precisely so that third parties can't build cheap PowerPC-based clones that'll run off-the-shelf copies of the Mac OS?" Well, we don't know what to tell you, except that PearPC has several screenshots showing Mac OS X in various stages of installation and execution. A few foolhardy AtAT viewers claim to have tried installing Panther in PearPC running on some Windows and Linux systems and report success-- or, at least, something sort of like it. ("I Can't Believe It's Not Success!™") Sure, the screenshots could be faked and the reports fabricated, but if it's all a hoax it's a pretty dull and unimaginative one. Not that there aren't a slew of bored, dull, unimaginative people around to perpetrate such a scam, but frankly, it sounds like the real deal to us. Occam's Cutting Thing, and all that.

So if PearPC is a real, honest-to-goshness PowerPC emulator for x86 that's capable of running Panther, what's the catch? Well, for one thing, you might have to tweak your own personal definition of the word "run." Software emulation is always going to be slower than running native code on the same hardware; we doubt many people are buying Macs because they match the curtains and then just running Windows 100% of the time in Virtual PC; likewise, even the most patient Mac users aren't going to be too happy buying cheap Wintels with the aim of running Mac OS X in PearPC. Also, right now PearPC is at version 0.1, which is "an experimental program not meant for productive use" just brimming with "unimplemented instructions, mysterious bugs, and missing features"; indeed, it bears the following gleeful warning: "Don't use it on important data, it WILL destroy them sooner or later!" Since most of us usually try to avoid the whole data-destruction thing, there's clearly a ways to go, yet.

Regardless, if even this 0.1 release is capable of running the PowerPC version of Mac OS X to some degree, Apple is no doubt sitting up and paying rapt attention. If there's a chance that Apple will lose even one low-end Mac sale to someone who buys a Dell and a copy of Mac OS X, you can be sure that Apple's lawyers are already mulling their options. Stay tuned, because by version 0.3 this plotline just might pick up a happy dose of courtroom drama...