According to Stellarolla’s blog the upcoming Snow Leopard update 10.6.2 and the Leopard update 10.5.9 will most likely break Intel Atom support. Thus rendering hackintosh installations on netbooks inoperable.
Although Apple does not provide products shipping with Intel Atom CPUs, the Mac OS kernel did support those. Now with the growing amount of hackintoshs it seems Apple tries to stop the use of their operating system on cheap an tiny netbooks.
Probably this is another indicator that Apple is going to bring the long rumored tiny tablet Mac. Anyway for people willing to maintain MacOS on their netbooks the easiest way is to not update to 10.6.2 or 10.5.9 at the moment.
About a year ago a company called ASEM released a device called EFI-X. This device has been claimed to be capable of booting several Microsoft Windows versions and Mac OS X Leopard.
Legal concerns
From the beginning there were question regarding the legal status of the device. But ASEM claimed the device is legal, although it circumvents Apple’s binary protection using Apple’s copyrighted secret operating system keys (OSK1 and OSK2).
Technical issues
Anyway EFI-X devices had some issues. Many forums reported about problems with Bonjour and sharing in general. In the meantime articles from the official EFI-X support forums have been suddenly disappeared. Customers reporting issues or solutions and workaround to severe bugs have been banned from EFI-X support forums – our own help article to recover almost lost data was removed aswell and one of our members has been officially banned from their forums (the reason was this article in october 2008).
Examining EFI-X in deep
Now some frustrated customers who are on the other hand technologically very familiar have examined the EFI-X device in deep. One of the main points AsereBln found: in contrast to what EFI-X is stating: “Our approach is entirely different, (..) all our code and development is our own only” – they seem to be using program code that has been developed by the OSX86 community though. They seem to be using “Disabler.kext“. Moreover another user (RezRov) found out the EFI-X Windows update software seems to be violating the LGPL as it incorporates a modified USB device library (libusb-win32).
Use of possibly unlicensed 3rd party program code, possibly illegal use of Apple security keys, and customer support below grade for a 170€ (250US$) commercial product that seems to be the summary about a year after product launch.
Lessons learnt
We suppose end users should be aware of this possible hassle. Only an original Apple Mac is really hassle free and 100% compatible to a Mac. But if you are technologically interested and have the time and motivation search the OSX86 communities for setups. The OSX86 forums are full of knowledge and willing to help. But remember a PC won’t ever be 100% compatible to a real Mac.
We’re almost sure, you read it already all over the net: Steve Jobs is back in his office. Rumors say he was transplanted a liver about two months ago and he is in good health condition.
Our comment
Does all these news affect anything? Currently it seems no.
Apple’s presentations can also be run by Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Bertrand Serlet, and Scott Forstall as we’ve seen on the last WWDC. But what about the future? What about the products?
This year’s WWDC
This year’s WWDC did not have new big products. It was all about the operating system update to 10.6. (called Snow Leopard) and iPhone 3GS that mainly has been speed improved and now got features that many people said to be overdue.
The future?
What will be the next WWDC presentation about? Yet another Mac Book Super Pro? Or another iPhone 3Gs2?
Who will be the wholistic spin doctor who feeds the company with ideas and innovations? This is the main question. And we’re gonna find out within the next few years.
Competition
We suppose competition will become harder at least in the field of cell phones. As Palm hired Apple’s iPod architect Jon Rubinstein three years ago it seems Apple has lost someone knowing how to design user interfaces for digital media.
What leads us to the bold question: why not buying Palm to stop those “separatistic” tendencies and make Jon Rubinstein Steve Job’s successor?
Since yesterday Apple seeds a beta build 10A314 of the forthcoming Snow Leopard. Developers report Apple recommends them to test 64-bit kernel extensions (Kexts) to speed up transition from 32-bit to 64-bit.
It does not seem that this build contains the rumored new User Interface (UI) called “marble” , that AppleInsider.com has reported a couple of days ago.
