Finally someone succumbs to rationality in the ridiculous story that has been doing the rounds the last few days. I was trying to work up the energy to respond to the nonsense myself |(but I’ve been sick with a bad bacterial flu and bronchitis) but thankfully Ars Technica has seen calm amid the phoney outrage. In case you missed it, some hacker on his or her blog noted that the code pertaining to the CPUs in an unreleased 10.6.2 has been changed significantly and that the side effect of this is that the Intel Atom CPU is no longer supported. This in turn means that popular hackintosh netbooks would no longer work with 10.6.2. This caused the collective mental implosion of nerds all over the internet with cries of outrage at this heinous crime. So from one hackers blog post about code changes in an unreleased version of OS X within a few hours it had become Apple declaring war on the hackintosh community. From a report that Apple my be removing support for Atom CPUs the leap was made to “Apple is disabling Atom processors” Considering Apple has never made a system with an Atom CPU, the fact that some people felt entitled to continued Atom support is hilarious. But it is the adamance by many, that this is some sort of malicious move on Apple’s, with no evidence whatsoever other than a blog post on some random hacker’s blog, that is just shocking.
The Fact is Apple publicly said that one of the goals of 10.6 was to reduce unnecessary code, and so removing unused CPU’s seems like fairly logical step in that process. But people, caught up in the cable news style of phoney outrage (that seems to be the in thing on the technology blogosphere at the moment,) would rather believe the conspiracy theory rather than the far simpler and more obvious answer. So I was relieved this morning when Ars Technica finally reported the story with a degree of rationality
From Ars Technica:
While conspiracy theorists might answer “yes”, it seems unlikely that Apple would target the subset of Hackintosh owners that are using Netbooks with Atom processors. When we asked our source, they said it was more likely that support was taken out during code optimization, particularly optimization for SSE4, which the Atom does not support.
[Read 10.6.2 kills most Netbook love - Ars Technica]
Some of the comments on forums about this are hilarious too. My favourite ones are from those arguing that Apple would loose customers because of this move, clearly not seeing the irony that what they were actually asking was for Apple to make it easier not to be an Apple customer.
The funny thing about this is, that hackers will probably get around this problem in a matter of days, so it’s not like the OS X hackintosh netbook community is going away any time soon. I can’t wait to see how the Angry Mac Bastards crew deal with this one.
No related posts.
Subscribe To RSS feed
As I said in my post on Sunday:
http://www.technovia.co.uk/2009/11/is-the-the-end-of-the-road-for-hackintosh-netbooks.html
- The netbook market is the one part of the Hackintosh community that Apple is least likely to care about enough to kill off. Apple doesn’t sell a netbook. Whatever is coming down the pipeline, it’s unlikely Apple will EVER produce something like a netbook. It would be much more likely to take steps to prevent you building a Mac Pro clone (at a third of the price) than stop you building a Mac clone in a category it has no intention of competing in.
Apple has lost precisely no sales because of netbooks running OS X. It’s probably lost a small but noticeable percentage of Mac Pro (and maybe iMac) sales to people building faster, cheaper hackintoshes. If you were Apple, which of those would you want to kill off? The one costing you money, or the one not costing you money?
- You don’t tinker with the kernel lightly. It’s the part of the OS that needs to be the most reliable. You optimise the code constantly for speed and reliability; you don’t put in code (or remove code) just to spike potential hackintoshers.
Seriously, the netbook market is irrelevant to Apple, and the people who make netbook Macs are not something that Steve J loses sleep over. I ran OS X on my netbook, and the experience (while surprisingly speedy) was too kludgy to keep me happy. It runs Windows 7 now, really well.
Here Here! I couldn’t agree more.