Apple To Prevent Booting Into Mac OS 9?

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.

Comments

That was inflamatory.

[jkujawa]

Every new version of Mac hardware has traditionally shipped with a bumped version of MacOS, that includes device drivers specific to the new hardware.

They have EOLed MacOS 9, and are focusing development on X. They're not breaking compatibility deliberately. They're just not devoting resources to make a dead operating system run on the new hardware.

You'll still be able to use OS 9 from Classic mode. They're just not providing device drivers to boot it.

Chill.

Re:That was inflamatory.

[BitGeek]

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.

Some points.

[BitGeek]

First off this story's premise flat out WRONG. Apple is not going tweak the hardware to prevent OS 9 from running. Apple doesn't work that way-- hell they went out of their way to make OS X work on machines that aren't officially supported (like my 9500) by providing drivers for hardware they haven't shipped yet.

OS 9-- and OS's 8 all the way back to the original Macintosh contain hardware specific code. Whenever Apple released a new version of the hardware, they'd release an extention to the OS to support it. So, it was very common to have hardware that couldn't run some versions of the OS without extensions.

All apple is doing is that going forward, they are not going to constrain their hardware by the design assumptions of OS 9. OS 9 is 1984 technology and assumes its in control of the hardware. Under OS X the hardware is far more abstracted.

So, Apple is going to design its hardware to run OS X and not *worry* about OS 9. Given the way Apple migrates its computers, if there's some controller chip for which 9 is not compatible, it will still take a year before the whole line is refreshed and os 9 will likely run on those new machines that don't yet have the controller chip, while it doesn't run on other new machines with the newer controller chip-- even though none of them are "officially supported"

The reason windows 95 runs on current hardware is that there has been no innovation in PC hardware. Clock rates have gone up, but nothing new has been done.

Finally this article is full of errors large and small (the coffin was not rolled onto stage-- why include a detail like that to make us think you were there and not making it up, and then get it WRONG?)

That a newspaper publisher in florida is stuck on 9 is NOT news. Check out "Crazy Apple Rumors Site" for a great parody of this kind of reporting.

It will take time for all the applications to migrate, but OS X is clearly moving in the right direction.

To characterize this as apple "tweaking" teh software so it won't run on hardware is to flat out lie about what's going on, and is unfair as well.

This is the kind of bullshit reporting that mac users have to deal with-- if its not claiming that apple is bankrupt when they have $5 billion in the bank, its claiming that apple or steve jobs go out of their way to annoy people, when in fact there's a much more plausible business decision behind it. This is a great example of the idiots at eWeek not understanging anything about how OS 9 works and how hardware is designed and integrated with the OS.

Re:Stupid user: Explain to me

[BitGeek]

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.)