Apple doesn’t have a Netbook and have been slating them ever since they arrived on the scene. Netbooks are popular, extremely popular. So what do you do if you want the benefit of a Mac and a Netbook?
Simple, you get yourself a standard netbook and illegitimately install Mac OS X and you’ve got yourself a Hackintosh. Cheap at the price too!
It must irritate Apple that a growing number of folk are making use of a software hack to easily install the Snow Leopard operating system onto windows and Linux based computers but what can Apple do about it?
Well now Apple are about to release the new OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and 10.5.9 updates and if the rumours are anything to go by anyone who has a Hackintosh had better beware.
Although the OS X 10.6.2 is only available as a developer release at the moment, apparently according to testers, it isn’t at all compatible with atom processors, which of course most netbooks are based on.
Now when you consider that Apple is not exactly a lover of Netbooks and doesn’t use Atom processors in their products why should they care? No really, why should they?
There are more than a few folk out there who believe that by releasing the new non Atom compatible updates, Apple is attempting to kill off the Hackintosh Netbook community.
This could well be something they might be keen to do, especially if the rumoured soon to make an appearance Apple Tablet is on its way.
Of course this is all speculation but the advice from StellaRolla, according to a report in Wired, is that if you have a Hackintosh don’t try and download the updates or your Hackintosh will break, at the moment anyway.
“Apple appears to have changed around a lot of CPU-related information” in the build, says StellaRolla.
“One of the effects of this is Apple killing off Intel’s Atom chip.”
The advice from StellaRolla is to stick with 10.6 and only try upgrading to the 10.6.2 if you are running an older or modified kernel.
It’s possible that by the time there’s a full release the incompatibility issue with Atom processors will be sorted but we’ll have to wait and see about that.
In the meantime the Hackintosh community will no doubt find a workaround pretty soon anyway.
