It might be a good idea to rewrite the preflight script in the 8.5 installer for Mac OSX. Right now, the installer appears to shell out to check the ID of the CPU, to make sure it’s running an Intel. However, it seems pretty narrow in the range of acceptable responses, so that if you have an Intel CPU that happens to return a string the installer doesn’t quite expect, it wrongly assumes it must be a PPC, and thus won’t install.
Why is this an issue? A growing number of people (like me) are putting OSX on non-Apple, but still non-PPC machines, and if the machine has, say, an Atom rather than a Core2Duo or the like, the installer wrongly thinks it’s a PPC.
The logic in the installer should be checking for PPC, and then and only then should it fail. It should err on the side of “allow” rather than “deny.”
that to be certified as a Mac app, you have to get apple’s certification. and apple does not want you running the Mac os on non-apple hardware. It might be a licensing and partnering issue.
We are working on some other enhancements to the installer on Mac and this fix will be included. There are actually other good reasons for making the fix, like performance.
However, please don’t take this as a sign of support for non-Apple hardware. We can’t officially support hardware configurations that Apple itself doesn’t support.