[solitas]

Since Apple will be designing their own board, they can do pretty much anything they want with the hardware to keep it all proprietary: special I/O chips (i.e. not consistent with regular wintel boards), different hardware mapping than that used by wintel boards, and so forth.

Windows ultimately _knows_ where to look for ports and ram space and rom space because all the wintel boards are mapped the same way. Apple doesn't have to do _any_ of that.

Look at it another way: WHY would they make software that could be used on _any_ board, just to have idiots start cloning it for everyone? Even with online registration, fingerprinting boards, and stuff, it's just not worth their time and money to combat it for the little profit they'd realize. "You wanna run our software - you gotta buy our board."

[B Knotts]

Sure, they can do that, but will they?

They had a proprietary motherboard and chipset before, and made a particular effort to standardize it (CHRP), and removed the proprietary ROMs.

Will they now undo all that? Maybe, but I don't think so.