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Apple To Prevent Booting Into Mac OS 9?

Posted by pudge on from the from-pig-to-man-and-from-man-to-pig dept.

A user writes that eWeek reports "A tweak to new models in its Macintosh line of desktop and portable computers will prevent booting into Mac OS 9, sources said, leaving the Unix-based Mac OS X as the sole operating system." That's a great idea, if they want to prevent people from upgrading their hardware, and to future versions of Mac OS X. I hope it's merely a rumor; there's apparently no technical reason for it, so if true, I imagine it is just to force more people to adopt the Mac OS X.

8 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why is this so terrible? by Cajal · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Even if they have EOL's OS 9, that's no reason to prevent future hardware from booting it. Windows 95 has been EOLed, but you could still boot it on your new PC if you wanted to.

    I'm not sure how Apple is going to implement this. They could hack OpenFirmware to not boot OS9, or they could modify the Startup Disk control panel to not display OS 9 devices. Or they could simply not make the OS 9 cds bootable.

    But you could still probably use Yaboot/Ybin (the open-source bootloaded used to boot Linux/PPC) to boot into OS 9. I wonder how much Apple would like the Open Source community then? :)

  2. Painful for VARs by DavidOster · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I work with a firm that takes a Mac, a bunch of third party PCI cards, and some custom hardware and software, and sells the whole thing as a bundled system to run one application. The PCI cards are manufactured by vendors that don't like supporting the Mac at all, and do it poorly. So, we use a mix of their libraries, and our own driver code.

    To stay in bisiness, we need to buy components to build our systems.

    If we can't boot into OS 9, we can't get at the hardware. Sure, we can re-write our drivers for OS X, but it is going to be a pain to reverse engineer our card vendors' libraries.

  3. Re:That was inflamatory. by BitGeek · · Score: 5, Interesting



    Yeah, you CAN"T run software that violated apple's programming guides going back to 1984!

    Any software written for the Mac that does those things is software that violates the programming guides.

    Software that doesn't runs great on Classic. And I've had a fun time finding the oldest piece of software I can and trying it out. I have software written in 1987 that runs under classic.

    --
    Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/ 1816257
  4. No, Apple sometimes reverses itself by AHumbleOpinion · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... Remember all the slack that Apple got for removing the Floppy Drive? ... People grumbled for a little while and realized, hey, Apple made the right move for me ...

    Not quite. The flack Apple received was not really over the floppy itslef, it was over the complete lack of writable removable media in the early iMacs. People did not eventually agree with Apple, Apple reversed itself and eventually equipped some iMacs with removable writable media, CD-R, and later CD-RW. The original Apple line that all people need is ethernet was a cover story for the fact that rev A iMacs with CD-R would have been too expensive.

  5. Re:What about us techs? by anwnn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you're going to be working on a new machine such as these much ballyhooed ones, then why not just use an external firewire device? These new machines are most certainly going to have the ports to do so.

    Install OS X onto an external drive, put your favorite utilities on there, and have at it.

    As a tech now, I look forward to the day when I can eliminate my CDs from my toolkit, and use strictly an external drive. Easier to update the software, and much quicker than running from CD.

  6. Re:Stupid user: Explain to me by BitGeek · · Score: 5, Interesting



    This article is just plane wrong.

    Yes, you can do things with cocoa that you can't with carbon. Carbon has sufficient aaccess to the machine to do all the important things you want to do-- but cocoa is a whole different way of working, and it is much superior to carbon.

    Yes, Cocoa applications are MORE NATIVE than carbon. Cocoa is the development environemtn Next made... .carbon is based on the old MAc OS.

    Use Cocoa. They are not equivilent. Carbon is great if you need to move a lot of old mac os code over, but otherwise, you should use cocoa. In the areas where you need to call carbon apis (because apple moved the stuff over rather than rewriting it, like quicktime) you can... no problemo. But cocoa is a lot better.

    And more native.

    And provides things you cannot do in carbon, no way, no how. (Like delegation, protocols, nibs, and categories are glorious.)

    --
    Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/ 1816257
  7. Re:Why is this so terrible? by stux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Windows 95 refuses to boot on an Athlon 1.3Ghz running at 1.3Ghz, or 1.1 or 1.2Ghz but will boot fine when running at 1Ghz, of course, It displays the speed as 999mhz...

    Go figure...

    --

    ---
    Live Long & Prosper \\//_
    CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
    Jedi & Last *-fytr
  8. Re:Why is this so terrible? by t · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The thought that software cannot damage your hardware is a naive assumption. Go ahead and set your refresh rate on your vid card to the highest damn thing you got. Chances are you'll hear a pop and see a puff of smoke as your high voltage capacitor blows up.

    In fact I am right now listening to the scsi session of the OSDN/Usenix Kernel Summit and they are talking about their concern of spinning too many scsi devices up at once since it could spike your power supply and fry it.

    t.