An undergraduate thesis submitted by an Apple intern, shows that the firm was trying in 2010 to port its Mac OS X to ARM based architecture.
The intern, Tristan Schaap, now works at Apple as a Core OS engineer and has been in the position for almost a year and half now. In 2010, the Dutch native was working a 12 week internship at Apple based on which he wrote his thesis for the Delft University of Technology in Netherlands.
In the thesis, Schaap mentions that Apple’s secretive work culture made it difficult for him to collaborate with others to get the necessary work done. He also mentions that he had to work with a lot of old code which over the years had developed bugs in it. But the main fact that has got tech blogs excited is the fact that he mentions trying to run Mac OS X on ARM chips.
The thesis – “Porting Darwin to the MV88F6281”, written in English, is available on the university’s website and makes for interesting reading for those who are familiar with operating systems and interested in how the Cupertino-based tech firm operates.
ARM chips have a lower power requirement than other chips and are increasingly used in smartphones and tablets, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad. An ARM based laptop would mean the battery life would be much longer than that of current models.
As of now, Apple has not committed to bringing out ARM-based MacBooks. Tech experts who have been following Apple say that the company does not like to rely on just one vendor for its parts. They also say that it took Apple several years before if finally switched to Intel chips for its computers.