Oh dear. According to OS X Daily Apple is effectively killing off support for Intel’s Atom processor in OS X 10.6.2.
The biggest consequence of this is, obviously, that anyone who wants to roll their own netbook running OS X is going to have to stick to either 10.5 or 10.6.1 – or, for the hardcore, hack future versions of OS X to run a stock 10.0 kernel.
Of course, Apple is under no obligation at all to support hardware it doesn’t use. But some will undoubtedly take this as a sign that Apple wants to kill off the Hackintosh community.
I don’t buy that, for a couple of reasons. First, the netbook market is probably the one which Apple has the least actual interest in. When someone runs OS X on a £300 netbook, they’re not doing it to replace a potential Mac purchase. Lost revenue to Apple from netbooks is probably as close to a rounding error as you can get.
Second, no sane company would tinker with the kernel of its operating system just to disable something of no commercial consequence. It’s one thing playing around with iTunes to stop the Palm Pre syncing. It’s quite another to mess around with code which you absolutely, 100%, need to be reliable.
It is, however, a shame.
UPDATE: Well, it looks like support for Atom is back. Which rather puts the kibosh on the conspiracy theories, I think.
UPDATE 2: And it seems like it’s definitely out again. Oh well.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a8328d17-8464-4bcc-8afc-c020897f1298)
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t get the pre blocking thing, all nokias cam sync to iTunes no problem via pc suite or multimedia transfer on mac. Or does nokia license the sync from apple.
I think – and don’t quote me on this – that the difference is that the Pre syncs from within iTunes rather than using a separate piece of software.
[New Post] Is the the end of the road for Hackintosh netbooks? – http://www.technovia.co.uk/2009/11/is-th...