Categorized | Announcements & News

Tags : Apple, Apple Mac

Apple Continues Cat and Mouse Game… With Hackintoshers

Posted on 10 November 2009 by


Firefox.png

A number of us have had fun with hackingtosh-ing our netbooks. There is something neat about a netbook running OSX while we continue to wait for something official in the form of a netbook or tablet.

Well it looks like iPhone jailbreakers aren’t the only ones Apple is trying to shut down.

Word is that yesterday’s 10.6.2 update to Snow Leopard officially drops support for Atom Processors- the brain in almost all netbooks. The result is a world of hurt for anyone trying to update a netbook to 10.6.2.

All is not lost, however.

Odds are, just like iPhone jailbreaking, someone will come along with a hack that gets things working again. But for now, if you have a hackintosh… don’t update.

So lets step back for a second and take a clear look a the lay of the land.

Apple is trying to turn off jailbreaking.

Apple continues to maintain an iron grip over the App Store and reject various apps at will.

And now Apple is ensuring that OSX can’t be put on anything but their hardware.

WOW! What other company would pull such things? It leaves me wondering, at some point will this all backfire on them?

This post was written by:

- who has written 2794 posts on Gear Diary.

Having a father who was heavily involved in early laser and fiber-optical research, Dan grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets. Dan’s father brought home one of the very first video games when he was young and Dan remembers seeing a “pre-release” touchtone phone. (When he asked his father what the “#” and “*” buttons were his dad said, “Some day, far in the future, we’ll have some use for them.”) Technology seemed to be in Dan’s blood but at some point he took a different path and ended up in the clergy. His passion for technology and gadgets never left him. +Dan Cohen

Contact the author


  • doogald

    I think that it’s more likely that Apple just didn’t bother checking if the kernel would boot on Atom processors. Why would they? And, if a developer reported that it would not boot with an Atom processor, why would they bother fixing it?

  • http://twitter.com/petlovermolly/status/5597994693 Molly Jordan

    Apple Continues Cat and Mouse Game… With Hackintoshers | Gear Diary: Apple Continues Cat and Mouse Game… With H.. http://bit.ly/2CqmZQ

  • gagendel

    doogald,

    I doubt this very much. The kernel is BSD which boots happily on the Atom. Apple had to make a conscience decision NOT to support the Atom. More likely, they wanted to turn on processor-specific optimizations in their build compiler which mitigated a baseline processor with more capabilities than the Atom.

    I don’t think this was a malevolent decision on their part, they NEED to do this as Snow Leopard is already taxing many older processors. I’m seeing significantly longer boot times with SL than it’s predecessor on the same hardware.

  • Joel McLaughlin

    The kernel is NOT BSD. It’s a mish mash of BSD and Mach. It’s pretty much a new animal. It’s name is actually Xnu.

    http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/arch_xnu.html