Apple Not Disabling OS X Atom Support After All 275
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."
Atom (Score:1, Interesting)
Wouldn't OS X be underpowered and a bit sluggish on a processor that slow?
Re:Just a reminder from Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WOLF! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Veiled Threat (Score:2, Interesting)
which reminds me of when RMS announced there was a backdoor in Apple software, then it was found to be false and he was spreading FUD. His retraction was like "yes I was wrong and sensationalist, but I was not really that wrong because there may be some undiscovered backdoor".
Ahem (Score:1, Interesting)
They can't disable it since it's on the upcoming Apple Slate.
I guess the lesson is (Score:2, Interesting)
not to listen to unsourced blogs written by someone just because they might have overheard someone talking about it in a bar somewhere sometime. Quite why this was all over the internet is anyone's guess.
Re:WOLF! (Score:5, Interesting)
According to this MacRumors article [macrumors.com], the developer who complained about lack of Atom support was in Build 10C531 which was a week before Oct 27, when build 10C535 came out which works fine with Atom. The developer who complained about lack of Atom support posted his complaint a day before. We're at 10C540 now - which was released yesterday or today.
So to release the complaint a day before Apple releases a new build? In the few hours it takes to pick it up, Apple would then have to see all the "bad PR" and have time to fix it before the next build? (I suspect most of the "bad PR" happened after 10C535 came out.
At best, it would be they broke Atom support accidentally, at worst, some guy just couldn't update his Hackintosh properly.
Re:Monopoly on handhelds with semi-open developmen (Score:3, Interesting)
iPod Touch is the only handheld video game system that 1. allows part-time developers to make and publish apps and 2. is sold in U.S. and European stores.
This description does not rise to any legal standard for judging a monopoly that I'm aware of. You're attempting to describe a market in such a way that no other products match the description. Contrast this with what you see, for example, in T. Penfield Jackson's Findings of Fact [justice.gov] document in the DoJ v MS case. (Note how it is defined in terms of market power, pricing, and what the alleged monopoly holder could do with that power to the prices)...
"33. Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market."
I think the question still stands: Precisely what monopoly does Apple hold?
Re:OS "Hacking" (Score:3, Interesting)
I know an open source game developer who builds and tests new Mac OS X releases of his cross-platform game on a Hackintosh. Since it's a rather demanding 3D game, a Mac Mini wouldn't be up for the task. Getting a Mac Pro just to compile & test your hobby open source game just seems like a waste of money.
He's got beta testers with real Macs though. It seems to work out pretty well.
Re:Monopoly on handhelds with semi-open developmen (Score:3, Interesting)
Legal standards for judging a monopoly are described relative to a given country, not the worldwide market. So by considering legal standards alone, I can narrow the field to products marketed in one country. Because you mentioned United States v. Microsoft, I'll consider the United States market, composed of Nintendo DS, Sony's PSP, Apple's iPod Touch, and a few players that are collectively as insignificant as desktop Linux was a decade ago when US v. M$ was argued. Of these, Nintendo and Sony have a history of refusing all part-time developers. So if a part-time developer wants to self-publish a game for a handheld, Apple's platform is the only option.
With respect to the Jackson quote: Yes, Apple could raise the $99 annual fee for the iPhone SDK or raise the App Store's commission from 30 percent without risking developer defection to another handheld platform. That could change once Droid and Pandora come out, but until then, Apple holds market power.
Re:Monopoly on handhelds with semi-open developmen (Score:3, Interesting)
In order to assert your point, you've had to conflate Apple's competitors (Nintendo and Sony) with users of the iPhone SDK. If this were to go before a court, they would ask what Nintendo and Sony could do to compete if apple were to attempt to exercise their market power "soley in terms of price". If they raised the $99 annual fee, as you suggest, this would actually put the iPod Touch in the same market as the Nintendo and Sony platforms (mobile gaming platforms with a high barrier to entry). This cuts against your original attempt to define the relevant market so that the iPod touch stands alone.
Re:Imaginations are running wild here! (Score:3, Interesting)
Their OS, until quite recently, had to work on x86, x86_64, PPC, PPC64, and ARM. Deliberately excluding one particular variant of one of these in a nontrivial way just means they will have to deal with increased complexity in their codebase, because the Hackintosh community is just going to work around it anyway. So it doesn't make business sense to do that.
Apple has had and continues to have many, many opportunities to do stuff in their OS that breaks it for non-Macs. They haven't yet, for good reason.
Re:Just a reminder from Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
But that $300 Netbook with the $50 profit margin will
#1 Sell ten times more than the $1000 tablet with a $300 profit margin. Thus earning $500 in profits for every ten Netbooks sold at $300 for every one $1000 Tablet sold with a $300 margin. Net sum of $200 more in profits.
#2 Raise the Apple marketshare of Mac OSX based devices.
#3 Put a lid on the Hackintosh market as a $300 Mac based Netbook is cheap enough to buy that even the stingiest of Hackintosh users can't pass up the $300 Mac OSX Netbook.
#4 Apple really needs a Netbook to compete with the PC companies who have their own Netbook.
#5 It means more iTunes sales, as well as more iPhone and iPod sales to sync up with the Mac Netbook.
Re:Apple are EVIL!! (Score:2, Interesting)
The only reason Microsoft is dominant now with the Windows platform is that Apple sued out of business all of Microsoft's competitors (GEM and GeoWorks are two that come to mind) back when there was real competition on x86 in the early GUI era. Their legal strategy guaranteed that it would have to be a BIG company that defeated their claim to OWN the GUI concept whole-cloth.
So yes. Apple is/was evil. Windows is Steve Jobs' fault.
Re:Just a reminder from Apple (Score:2, Interesting)
But that $300 Netbook with the $50 profit margin will
#1 Sell ten times more than the $1000 tablet with a $300 profit margin. Thus earning $500 in profits for every ten Netbooks sold at $300 for every one $1000 Tablet sold with a $300 margin. Net sum of $200 more in profits.
I think Apple is worried people will realise they don't need a $1000 machine with a $300 profit margin. The worst case for them would be that most Mac users buy $300 netbooks instead of the expensive machines and the number of Mac users doesn't increase.
In fact for your scheme to work they'd need to sell six netbooks to make up for the loss of one tablet. Now it's quite possible that there just aren't that many PC users who would switch but for price whereas most Mac users would buy a cheaper machine if it were available. And incidentally it's worse than this - the people who want a netbook would otherwise buy a $2000+ Mac Book Air. The profit margins on that are probably a lot more than $300. If it were $500 they need to "convert" 10 PC users to compensate for every Mac user that buys a cheaper machine. This to me seems to be very unlikely. Therefore a Mac netbook is a bad idea for them, as is allowing OSX to run on regular PCs legally and without hacks.
Actually I've talked to PC notebook ODMs who have said that the whole netbook trend is a mistake for the industry - basically there's a fixed number of people buying PCs. Before netbooks they'd buy a notebook and the margins were quite high for the PC vendor. Now they buy a netbook and the margins have been cut drastically. So the netbook trend has basically cut revenues. Of course in the PC world it's even worse to not make netbooks if your competitors do so. Then instead of the reduced margin you can get on a netbook you get nothing.
Still the whole point of Apple's business model is that they can say no to products which would cause them to lose money. That includes clones, retail OSX for PCs and netbooks. Don't get me wrong, Apple will eventually make a small machine, it's just it will cost a lot more than most netbooks. Of course it'll have some features they don't have too. What they won't do is sell a $300 identikit Atom netbook, because that would compete with their high end, high margin machines.
Re:Just a reminder from Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
#1 Be a general POS compared to most Apple hardware and tarnish their brand.
#2 Canabalize the sales of their more expensive (and higher margin) laptops.
For that matter, I can't say I agree with your points:
#1 How many of those sales will come at the price of a $300 profit laptop or tablet? If they lose 1 high profit sale for every 5 low profit sales they gain, it's a losing strategy.
#2 If they honestly cared about market share over all else they would have taken this approach a long time ago. Considering the amount of money they make I don't think they give two shits about market share in the computer space as long as sales grow by some small amount.
#3 The Hackintosh market is so small that they likely don't care about it. It wouldn't be a bump on their already small sales numbers.
#4 You assume Apple wants to compete in the race to the bottom netbook segment of the market that will likely cannibalize their macbook sales.
#5 I don't have figures, but given that iTunes is something like 75% of online music sales it's pretty obvious that more than Mac users are downloading music with it. It works on Windows as well so they don't need to move more hardware to increase music sales. The same applies to iPods. They really can't grow that market much more than they already have.
Considering that their stock is worth something like ten times what it was since Jobs came back to the company, I think he has a pretty good idea of how things should be run. If Apple manages to catch the next big wave in the tech industry and release a product that's even half as dominating as the iPod, they'll easily surpass Microsoft at the height of its power. Sure their business strategy means you won't get a cheap crappy computer running OS X, but considering you can already make your own, why do you need Apple to release one?
Re:Just a reminder from Apple (Score:2, Interesting)
When was the last time you heard a rumor that Microsoft was disabling support for some line of processors on Windows? If some idiot did claim that in a blog post, he would be laughed at.
I can vaguely remember an uproar when some AMP CPUs over a certain frequency wouldn't work in some parts of Windows (SCSI driver?). Turned out that MS in a timing loop used a NOOP version of some complex opcode that took dozens of cycles on Intel CPUs, but AMD had optimized that opcode to run much faster, resulting in a divide by zero or similar.
Re:Atom (Score:3, Interesting)
windows is off faster than the stickers when i buy a netbook. And no, the same model without windows was not avaiable. They probably do not get the "cheaper OEM version of their OS" if they do not install it on all of them.