Best document / book for Mac hardware?

stackexchange.com

I am asking here for the sake of completeness. I've had fun asking this on various sites, each time having it closed, following peoples' recommendations, having it closed... It's been closed on StackOverflow, closed on SuperUser, closed on programers.stackexchange... perhaps it's found its spiritual home here?

I'm reading 'Mac OS X Internals' but it was published in 2007. It has an extensive section on Mac hardware (table of contents for Chapter 3) and I want to read it all ... except it's for PowerPC not Intel architecture and I would probably be wasting my time.

• How much of the chapter is still relevant?
• What's the best place to gain the equivalent knowledge about the Intel architecture? I basically want an Intel equivalent of that chapter.

I don't want to actually do any hardware tinkering, I just want a solid understanding of the hardware as a programmer.

Solution 1:

I'm sorry that you've had such a difficult time asking this question on Stack Exchange. I haven't been able to find a better/more up-to-date book, but most of Mac OS X is CPU architecture-independent anyway, and the book you're reading does contain an appendix that discusses Mac OS X on x86 hardware and the corresponding similarities and differences between PowerPC hardware:

Appendix A, "Mac OS X on x86-Based Macintosh Computers," highlights the key differences between the x86-based and PowerPC-based versions of Mac OS X. Besides this appendix, the book covers the details of several key x86-specific topics, such as EFI, GUID-based partitioning, and Universal Binaries. Most of Mac OS X is architecture-independent, and consequently, the majority of the book is architecture-independent.