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OS X Update Officially Kills Intel Atom Support
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Nov 11, 2009 08:54 AM
from the hackintosh-smackintosh dept.
from the hackintosh-smackintosh dept.
bonch writes "After apparently disabling and then re-enabling support for the Atom chipset in test builds of their 10.6.2 update, Apple has officially disabled support for the chipset in the final update. This makes it impossible for OSX86 users to run 10.6.2 on their Atom-based netbooks until a modified kernel shows up."
Related Stories
[+]
Apple: Mac OS X 10.6.2 Will Block Atom Processors 1012 comments
Archeopteryx writes "According to Wired's 'Gadget Lab' blog, Snow Leopard's next update, OS X 10.6.2, will block the Atom processor and will disable many 'Hackintosh' netbooks. It is indeed true that OS X will run just fine on some netbooks if you install the right drivers and ktexts, but Apple's EULA has always specified that the license was applicable only to Apple hardware. There have always been processor types specified in OS X and that have to be worked around now for those who want to use an Atom or similar non-Apple-adopted processor, so this is likely no more than a hiccup on the road for the OSX86 crowd. But, it raises the question: is it time for Apple to sell a license for non-Apple hardware — priced accordingly of course — for those people who want OS X on platform types Apple has not yet adopted, like the netbook? The only reason OS X is not on my Eee is that I want to comply with the licensing terms. I could just pay for a license to use it."
[+]
Apple Not Disabling OS X Atom Support After All 275 comments
bonch writes "Contrary to previous reports, Atom chip support is working fine in the latest 10C535 build of OS X 10.6.2. Apple's EULA still states that OS X is licensed to run only on Apple hardware, but it looks like OSX86 hackers can breathe easy ... for now."
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Dell Zino (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dell Zino (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely not, Apple has sold machines and sells machines to that demographic already. It's netbooks that challenge Apple, because they don't actually offer anything in that market.
Parent
"Officially"....? (Score:5, Insightful)
I RTFA, and there's no acknowledgement by Apple of what they have done or why they have done it. So the update does not "officially" break Atom support, it just breaks Atom support.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that OS/X ever had official atom support to start with. The interesting question is this caused by intent or because Apple didn't test the update on an Atom. Of course they have no reason to test the update on an Atom because they do not sell a single computer that uses the Atom.
Re:"Officially"....? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not exactly. I have been programing for a long time. Way back when the PII came out our application blew up. We used Borland Pascal and there was an issue with the CRT.o unit that blew up on the Intel PII. At the OS level the Atom is not 100% identical with the Core2Duo, P4, i7, or AMD line. It is possible that their is a bug that only happens on the Atom and Apple didn't test for it because they do not support the Atom or plan on supporting the Atom with this OS.
You think that they did this to be a pain but to be honest if they where going to do this then why not break all hackintoshs and not just netbooks?
They may have done it intentionally or it could just be a side effect that they didn't test for and frankly don't need to test for.
What I am saying that I can not say why it happened or what exactly did happen. But then nobody outside of Apple can know for sure.
But since Apple never officially supported any none Apple hardware it seems funny that people are saying that they officially stopped supporting Atom netbooks.
Parent
Re:"Officially"....? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even saying it "breaks Atom support" is perhaps a little inaccurate. There has never officially been Atom support in OSX. It just happened to work. Now it happens to not work. Maybe it was intentional on their part, but it was never "official".
Parent
Not that big of a deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Hackintosh users can live without the 10.6.2 update. This doesn't really break anything, it just prevents netbook users from having the latest set of OS patches between now and whenever the community finds a workaround.
Not in Darwin? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing that, since the actual kernel is open source [apple.com] that they are doing some additional check further up the chain in a non-open source module. Otherwise wouldn't it be trivial to do a diff, search for the code that checks for the stepping, and if it's an Atom, call exit(0)?
Re:Not in Darwin? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure calling exit(0) in the kernel will do what you expect.
Parent
Once again, so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple doesn't make an Atom-based Mac. Nor did they in the past. They explicitly sell and license Mac OS X to run only on Macs. If you want to try and get it to work on a non-Mac with a different CPU and/or chipset than what Apple supports, you're on your own, good luck to you.
Apple isn't going to send an army of lawyers to your house to stop you from trying to build a hackintosh. They will if you figure it out and then start selling them - see Psystar for details. But they won't do anything to make it easy for you to build a hackintosh, and if it breaks - oh well, sucks to be you, next time buy a Mac or stick to a supported OS on your hackintosh.
Me, I stick to Windows 7 Pro on my eee901 for now, but I may switch to eeebuntu soon. I like it. I'll keep Mac OS on my Macs.
Atom vs PPC (Score:4, Insightful)
What I find ironic is that there is more fuss being made about support for Atom processors than PowerPC processors, and Apple even made PowerPC based computers. Once could also complain about the lack of 68k support, but probably most people don't remember back that far.
Mac OS X? What about NT? Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Spare some thought on the multitude of NT 3.5 users, happily running on MIPS or Alpha, when EVIL Microsoft decided to just release NT 4.0 on Intel hardware!
Seriously, it's their product. Want to run an operating system on Atom? Make and sell one! There is a market opportunity for you to exploit instead of whining.
Re:No biggie (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more about "user experience" than anything else. They don't want to allow OSX to run on anything other than their hardware, because some cheap chipset might make the whole thing malfunction and users would be fast to blame apple for a bad product... Even though it would be the user at fault for not respecting the hardware specifications...
That's a policy that have been enforcing for a long time now.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well thats a load of crock, now isnt it?
Apple makes money on Hardware and software as a bundle.
Hackintoshes threaten this money making opportunity.
I'm not concerned with it, because I don't plan on running OS X on anything other than an expensive computer sold by apple. And since I have no desire to spend on such a frivolous thing, the plans happily sort themselves out.
The user experience Apple truly cares about is the one where the user pays apple a large sum of money. Everything else merely facilitates t
Re: load of crock? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not completely. Sure, Apple is a *business* and as such, they're very interested in turning a good profit.
But to say they don't really care about the "user experience" as long as they rake in a lot of money? There are FAR too many facts that refute it to genuinely make that claim.
I'll give you just one story from last week. A woman I know convinced her best female friend to purchase an Apple Macbook, when she was in the market for a new laptop last year. (She already owned an iMac she was really pleased with, and wanted her friend to switch to Mac too so they'd be running the same type of computer, not have all the potential virus or spyware issues, etc.)
Well, unfortunately, her friend isn't very computer literate in the first place, and on top of that, it seems her Macbook's chicklet keyboard had an issue with one of the letter keys sticking occasionally. She managed to screw all sorts of things up that were simply user-error (locked herself out of visiting any web sites while trying to play with the parental controls feature, for example), and kept getting frustrated. The Apple store was a good 1 1/2 hour drive away from her house, making matters worse. When she did vist, the Genius Bar people helped straighten out her software issues ... but she was still upset about the sticking keyboard key. They had her mail it back to Apple for service at that point, but for some reason, Apple shipped it back without her issue being addressed.
So at THIS point, despite it all being relatively minor stuff - she was PISSED at Apple and their products and service. She stormed back to the Apple store to complain about the repair not being done properly, and you know what? They "bent some rules" for her, and swapped her for a BRAND NEW Macbook Pro which had more RAM, a better graphics card, faster processor and more drive space than her low-end Macbook that was just out of the 1 year warranty!
Now she's finally "seen the light" on Apple customer service, and is buying an iMac as her next desktop machine at Xmas time.
There's a reason Apple consistently gets top ratings in magazines like Consumer Reports for customer service. They screw things up like ALL companies do, but they're known for resolving issues to people's satisfaction, eventually ... not just saying "Sucks to be you!" or wasting hours of your time on hold with someone who can't speak your language very well, reading off a card to you.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, in this exact case they make the software malfunction on a certain chipset and the only one to blame is Apple.
Parent Posts Case In Point (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/29250/1023/
Nowhere does the article say "Jailbroken", even though the worm only targets jailbroken, non-officially sanctioned stuff that lives outside Apple's cage. This is an open and shut case of Apple's hardware getting blamed for something the hobbyist hack community does. An IT manager who's considering brining iPhone's into the business might read the article, not go the extra mile to find out the exploit's for jailbroken phones only, decide that iPhones are not secu
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Tightens the code and all that.
I must be unfamiliar with the x86 architecture. Can you explain to me how blacklisting x86 devices as opposed to other x86 devices "tightens the code and all that"?
Maybe they should just build a white list that checks the firmware of the motherboard to make sure that the device is an approved "user experience" device before booting? I mean, they're suing Psystar when they could just let the problem take care of itself, right?
In my opinion what Apple is doing is bad for the market and bad for end
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Informative)
They should explicitly state their product's system requirements and let the consumer decide (like everyone else).
From the Snow Leopard Tech Specs:
General requirements
Mac computer with an Intel processor
Only Apple makes Macs and Apple does not make any product with the Atom processor. Therefore, no computer with the Atom is supported. Neither is any computer with an AMD procesor. Or any computer not made by Apple, since all Mac clones are over ten years old and used PowerPCs.
None of those computers are supported. The fact that it works on some of them is a happy coincidence. There it is, written clearly in the very first requirement.
Parent
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pulling this out of my nether regions, but the last slashdot article implied that they didn't "disable" Atom processors, per se. They turned on compiler optimizations that generate instructions that the Atom doesn't support.
If that's the case, it "tightens the code" because the new instructions run faster on the Intel processors Apple actually uses. However, Atom no longer works because the cheaper processors don't support those instructions.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You see, the Atom is an X86 (or, on some, X86-64) based processor, so they didn't have to change their code at all for it to work on it in the first place. Now, they must look at the Processor ID and specifically disable support.
Bill
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Insightful)
Any other company and yes, they would be blamed.
Maybe if "any other company" had sold the product explicitly with Atom support and then reneged on that promise.
AFAICT the argument from the whiners is "Even though OS X is explicitly sold with strings attached which make it hard for me to legally build a hackintosh, it shouldn't be because I don't like it and any attempt to enforce such strings, no matter how feeble such an attempt may be, is nasty!"
Parent
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: Any other company? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, I doubt that.... The computer industry has a LONG reputation of building OS's that only run with specific hardware configurations sold by the OS vendor. Until the idea of a "PC clone" came along, this was pretty much how ALL personal computers were sold. (You weren't going to get your Commodore 64 to run anything written for the Atari 800, and your TI99/4A didn't work with any of those, OR a computer from Radio Shack....) SPARC machines ran their own operating systems too. (I think Intergraph had to sell a special port of Windows NT for them, to get them to run that.)
Certainly, the minicomputers and mainframes out there all ran their own proprietary OS's too.
Parent
Re: Any other company? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apply [sic] did intentionally cripple their OS because Atoms are standard X86 instruction sets.
But what is a standard X86 instruction set? Does it include SSE3?
The Atom includes SSE3, but Intel's compilers require a special switch to generate SSE3 compatible code for the Intel Atom. So I would assume there is something "special" about SSE3 on the Atom.
So, possibility one is that Apple is explicitly saying that they want to crush these people making Hackintosh Netbooks. Possibility two is that Apple is now using instructions that are not available on the Intel Atom because they don't make an Intel Atom-based machine and would rather optimize their code for the machines that they do make.
Which one seems like it makes more sense?
Parent
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious if apple even has the legal right to restrict installation to apple hardware.
If it's presented after purchase, then you are not obliged to agree to it.
Yet if the store you're supposed to return it to says "all sales final" then wouldn't apple be on the hook for handling refunds of the "refused to consent to the EULA" variety
The MacOS X retail package has a note "sale is subject to acceptance of the license". A sale only happens when both sides agree that it happens. And since Apple doesn't agree to the sales contract unless you accept the license, there is no sale up to that point. No sale, no license, no right to do anything.
And of course Apple is on the hook for refunds if you don't agree to the license. That is what Apple itself says; they say that they will refund your money, as long as either (1) you didn't break the seal on software that was accompanied by a printed license, or (2) the software was not sealed or not accompanied by a printed license, and it is not installed on your computer.
My copy of 10.6 was neither sealed nor accompanied by a printed license, so I would have fully expected to get my money back if I didn't accept the license. On the other hand, without accepting the license there is no purchase (until you accept the license, you just hold a box that belongs to Apple, and Apple holds some money that belongs to you).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is the Atom supports a similar instruction set to the standard processors.
Dropping support in this case means they are adding explicit code designed solely to prevent use on a processor the OS would otherwise work with.
If Microsoft modified Windows 7 64-bit edition to BAN support for AMD 64-bit processors, and therefore encourage users to utilize only Microsoft Approved or Microsoft Manufactured hardware that utilizes Intel microprocessors.
Microsoft would be in court, at the wrong side
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be operating under the premise that Apple is a Software company like Microsoft. They're not. They're a hardware company like HP or Dell. That the operating system they provide with their hardware is their own creation is irrelevant, and they're under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to provide support for any platform that they didn't sell.
That they're disabling support for the Atom platform is irrelevant. They're disabling support for a platform that they don't sell. The EULA that comes with their software specifically prohibits your using that platform in the first place, so if you were using their software legitimately, it shouldn't affect you. If it does affect you, too bad.
Parent
If this were another company... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft ended up in hot water for tying a !@#$ing BROWSER to their operating system and everyone cheered for their defeat. If Apple's market share wasn't so comparatively small, they'd be torn to shreds by the DOJ over this.
Parent
Re:If this were another company... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:If this were another company... (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the reason Microsoft got shat on was its history.
1. They illegally tied the sale of Windows to the sale of MS-DOS, a product which they had a number of legitimate competitors for.
2. When they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they voluntarily settled rather than go to court. Part of their settlement was they would never ever tie their products together in that way again.
3. They then loosely tied IE (an existing product with an existing competitor) into Windows 95.
On the reverse side of this coin, as much as we might have liked it if they had, Apple has never really had a legitimate competitor to their hardware or OS. The only "Mac clones" that were ever legally sold were still licensed by Apple. Additionally, they've never explictly agreed not to tie their products together in order to avoid a spanking from the Department of Justice.
I'm not a particular fan of Apple, the company is just as arrogant as MS. And though I haven't seen as much unethical behavior (just agressive asshattery) from them as from MS, they still stomp all over the consumer and their rights as a matter of routine.
That said, comparing MS's antitrust trials to Apples current situation shows either a lack of perspective and history or a talent at hyperbole.
Parent
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Insightful)
How are they obligated to ensure that their product continues to work on a processor that they do not support? Why are they obligated to ensure the OS X hackintosh community can continue installing OS X on Atom-powrred netbooks?
they aren't and they aren't. but that's not what this argument is about.
the problem is that it is a generally not nice thing to do. many people (i am not one of them, as i would not sully my hands with os x) have quite happily installed os x on intel atom powered products and (presumably) enjoyed using the hardware with this operating system. for apple to deliberately disable their systems from working is just not nice. what harm is it doing apple? why do they have to say to these (presumably hundreds if not thousands of people) "we don't like what you're doing so we're going to make sure you can't!"? it's just small-minded, egocentric behaviour which would get a reprimand if a child did it.
Parent
Re:No biggie (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the Atom supports a similar instruction set to the standard processors.
Dropping support in this case means they are adding explicit code designed solely to prevent use on a processor the OS would otherwise work with.
And you know this how? There is zero evidence to support this. The much more likely scenario is that something simply broke compatibility with the Atom chipset, and Apple never bothered to test it and doesn't care that it's broken.
Parent
Re:No biggie (Score:4, Interesting)
"If its 'similar' and not 'the same', (I don't know, I am taking your word for it) "
If that was the case, Microsoft would have to provide a special version of XP, Vista and 7 just for netbooks, which clearly they don't: you can install the common x86 or x64 version on any Atom cpu.
XP particularly was made before the Atoms appeared, so it would never work.
Parent
Re:Start complaining, "free" software people (Score:4, Funny)
ARTHUR: Please, please good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?
WOMAN: No one live there.
ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?
WOMAN: We don't have a lord.
ARTHUR: What?
DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
ARTHUR: Yes.
DENNIS: But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
ARTHUR: Yes, I see.
DENNIS: By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,--
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: --but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
WOMAN: Order, eh -- who does he think he is?
ARTHUR: I am your king!
WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.
ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings.
WOMAN: Well, how did you become king then?
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Listen -- strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went around saying I was an empereror just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up!
DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give away. Did you here that, did you here that, eh? That's what I'm on about -- did you see him repressing me, you saw it didn't you?
Parent
Re:Start complaining, "free" software people (Score:5, Insightful)
>> "Free" software people won't touch Apple with a long pointed stick. It's even more closed and unfriendly than MS.
You do realize that OS X comes bundled with 100's of 'free' open source utilities/apps, right?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you realize that getting the apps themselves isn't the point?
I can get things like GCC and bash on Linux, Windows, Solaris, OS X and so on.
The difference is in that when something goes wrong, on Linux and OpenSolaris I can debug all the way up to the kernel, while on Windows and OS X I'm stuck if the problem happens to be somewhere in the closed components of the system, and the core system is very unfriendly to
Re:Start complaining, "free" software people (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure you do, but your assertion that "OS X is even more locked down than Windows" is a little bit a stretch, surely. How much of the Windows source is open? How much of OS X? Clearly both are closed OSes, but the core of OS X is a lot more open than Windows.
On the second point, some citations would be nice. Apple is moaned at a lot for their contributions to the OSS community and their "theft" from it (funny, I thought it was free) especially in cases like Webkit/KHTML and Darwin itself.
So, what currently unaddressed security hole exists in the open source stuff Apple ships? Are you claiming that Apple doesn't update the OSS stuff it ships in security updates? Are you claiming they specifically ignore security holes?
What's to stop you from rolling your own implementations of these vulnerable services on OS X if they are open source and you need to run them but are concerned that the shipped Apple version is insecure, assuming that the current OSS version has also been patched, or are you claiming that because Apple doesn't push a patch down on OS X the very same day a patch to the OSS stuff is done by a third party because they may need to test it on their internal OS X builds first that they are "abysmal at keeping up to date".
Parent
Mods on crack today? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple owns or participates in a HUGE number of open-source projects.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
(shrug)
Amigas had plug-n-play back in 1985. I always find it amusing when Mac or IBM PC users get all excited about stuff I was already doing in the 80s. "Hey look. My OSX can do true preemptive multitasking!" or "My Linux can detect when I plug in my printer!"
"That's nice. Been there; done that."
Re:Mods on crack today? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not how much sense you make, it's how "strongly" you feel about it and how loud you can yell. Just like in politics
Really? In that case, $5 for everyone that mods me +1.
Now it's just like politics.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a difference between leaving in support and explicitly disabling "support". I put support in quotes because there was never anything extra done to support atom, it just acts like a normal processor. This si like websites which look at your browsers user agent and deny you access because you are running the wrong browser, when the page would run in the blocked browser anyway.
Re:Oh, great. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a difference between leaving in support and explicitly disabling "support". I put support in quotes because there was never anything extra done to support atom, it just acts like a normal processor. This si like websites which look at your browsers user agent and deny you access because you are running the wrong browser, when the page would run in the blocked browser anyway.
They are not "explicitly disabling 'support'" and they were never "leaving in support." As you said, they never did anything to support Atom, and now they've coincidentally broken it. Just like when a website starts using a JavaScript function that breaks in Opera/Safari/Chrome because it was never tested on that browser.
Parent
Re:Oh, great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, with that said, I think it's genius what they are doing from a business perspective... Making the software an beacon to their hardware profit center. From a moral perspective, I don't care what they do, cause I'm not spending $3k on a MacBook Pro... OSX may be amazing, but I am quite happy with Ubuntu, so this news has no consequence for me. If you want the freedom to do what you choose, use a free OS (Linux flavors, BSD flavors, etc). If you want the polished yet non-free OSs (OSX, Windows), then you have to live with the restrictions... It's as simple as that. They own the copyright on the OS, so they can tell you how they want you to use it. You can argue about the moral implications of what they do all day long, all it does is keep their name in the news...
Parent
Re:makes me rethink things (Score:5, Insightful)
And please before you tag me as not friendly to open source, I've been using Fedora since it was called Red Hat 5.2. Just make absolutely sure you are willing to put up with the change in scenery... Ubuntu tends to be a rather cutting-edge distro. Hope it works for you.
Parent
Re:That's fine (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm. No it doesn't. It actually means *more* bloat, albeit insignificant, because they have to explicitly check to see which CPU you are using.
Parent