According to unconfirmed reports (see 1, 2), hackers have easily cracked Mac OS X 10.4.3's improved TPM protection. Not only the new version runs on any PC, but it also enables accellerated graphics on some ATI chips and AltiVec instructions emulation on Rosetta.

Is the "any-pc" version of Mac OS X getting better than the official one? Probably, as hackers have managed to crack the latest version of the operating system and have enabled new features not available on the official Apple Intel Developer kit.

The first good news is that some graphic chips from in the range of the 98xx series are accellerated and work with technologies like CoreImage. That means that a PC running Mac OS X could even run some games.

The second good news is that Rosetta can be enabled so as to add AltiVec emulation. It means that an x86 based Mac (or PC with the hack) may run any older Mac OS X application. Apple never told it wasn't possible to run AltiVec based applications on an Intel based Mac, we can hope that the feature will be activated on the official release.

This is quite great news for the forthcoming MacTel platform but not necessary good news for Apple, as the company is struggling to prevent hackers from running its operating system on non-Apple branded PCs.