What hardware makes the AmigaOne different to a Mac?

[CodeSmith]

It's not quite that simple.  The hardware on a Mac is different from that on an AmigaOne (the northbridge chips, responsible for managing memory and the buses, are different and probably incompatible, so all the hardware registers will be in different places in memory), so you'd need to write an entire Mac HAL (hardware abstraction layer) for OS4 in order to make it work.  This is no longer a crack job, we're talking weeks of hard work, and the reward would probably be getting sued by Apple (they want to sell MacOS too, not just Macs)

Something similar was argued wrt the Pegasos 1 - that's different, because the Pegasos 1 is very similar to the AmigaOne, so it should be a great deal easier to do (both have the Articia S northbridge and VIA southbridges, which are largely compatible with each other).  The pegasos 2, however, is again very different from the AmigaOne (has a Marvell northbridge), so you're back to needing a new HAL.

[CodeSmith]

@Kronos:

The ones writing the HAL could be sued by Apple under the DMCA for reverse-engineering, since Apple does not release that information.  Since the DMCA is a federal law, it's got a pretty stiff penalty.  I wouldn't want to be the one in court with *that* hanging over my head.

About the "bastardized BIOS": since the rom is now flashable (and has been for a while), it is no longer the source of the "pirate protection".  I've heard it said that the protection is still there, just somewhere else on the motherboard.  I couldn't tell you where, though, I'm not part of the group "in the know".  Therefore the protection is now a lot like a USB dongle, only it doesn't take up a USB slot.  Best of both worlds, IMHO: Hyperion gets protection vs pirates, I get to do what I want with the board.

Alan has already said that his main customer is not the Amiga community, but industrial systems and kiosks.  Those guys are a lot more impressed by low power consumption and low heat output than by Intel and GHz.  Look at Bill Buck, he's also got bigger fish to fry with his Marvell-based solution: set-top boxes, where again GHz is unimportant.  Until there's a whole lot more Amigans, we're going to have to settle for this sort of sharing.

I think we'll both be surprised by the number of AmigaOS4 users by this time next year... remember, Alan was pitching the use of AmigaOS to the Chinese in his last visit, instead of Linux.