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Macs Won't Boot Into Mac OS in 2003
Magnus Olsson writes "Apple announced at Apple Expo in Paris, that they are dropping the ability to boot into Mac OS after January 2003. It will still be possible to access Mac OS via the Classic environment under Mac OS X." Apparently, eWeek was right, and the final nail is being driven. So, where's mol for Mac OS X?
it's annoying for those who have thousansd in software that will only run in OS9, they get a bit of a cold shoulder from Apple is seems as of late.
this whole push towards OSX reminds me of one of those situations where everyone knows it has to be done, but no one is really dying to do it. Apple has a new OS that they're still trying to get the bugs worked out of, get it cleaned up and hopefully working to the point where it's a big enough incentive to move people over.
at the same time, OS9 users don't really want to move. they have a lot of time and money invested in both OS9 itself and their software. learning something different after you've gone 10+ years with the same thing isn't something most people look forward to. they also have a legitimate argument that a lot of smaller titles are making it over to OSX. i know in the research community that i work with there are key apps that haven't been ported because they were written by some researcher on their own time, for free years ago. that guy isn't going to take the time to learn how to port his program to OSX most likely. (and yes there is classic mode, but that rather ruins the point of OSX)
time will tell how this works out, but one way or another it had to happen. at least with 10.2 it's not a bad thing anymore.
Can they really do this?
Apple has required minimum versions of system software to boot a Macintosh computer since at least 7.0.1, when the Classic II, LC II, and Quadra series couldn't boot anything before 7.0.1. It lets Apple gradually get rid of legacy hardware in a computer, something the PC side can't seem to do for some reason.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I presume "mol" is referring to the Mac-on-Linux project.
Meep meep
Apple even watched it happen once before, when they switched from 68k architecture, to PowerPC. They ended up having to include an interperater/emulator for 68k apps in later versions of Mac0S.
This is completely untrue.. PowerPC machines emulated 68K code from the start, which is often lauded as one of the most graceful computer transition in the industry's short history. Completely transparent, totally useable.
Oh, and yeah, Steve Jobs will not personally go around to Mac users' homes, deleting all old copies of MacOS 10 so you can all relax ...
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Now we just need computers that will refuse to boot windows.
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
I'm not so sure this is aimed at Mac users so much as developers. Antecdotal evidence suggests that Mac users have no problem migrating to OS X. It's companies like Quark and alot of the printer and scanner manufacturers that are dragging their feet in supporting OS X. It seems like its a way for Apple to say, 'Look, no one is going to be using OS 9 on any of our new machines, so if you want people to continue to purchase your products then you need to develop programs and drivers for OS X'. Seems reasonable enough to me.
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
Apple *does* include the functionality to use OS7/8/9 apps in OSX, you just didn't bother to find that out. This article is about *ne hardware* not booting OS9 anymore - something that was bound to happen eventually, and not suprising if you know anything about the pairing of the Mac OS and Apple hardware. Essentially, Apple is just choosing not to continue to update OS9 for new hardware - which they've always had to do previously whenever new hardware was launched. Why should they update an OS they've long-since put on EOL, and which they already provide a solution for? Regardless, OS9 will still continune to boot within OSX, as it always has been able to, in the form of "Classic" - which will provide the exact capabilities you are attacking them for not providing.
Get your facts straight. You have a right not to like Apple - but at least know what you're talking about.
If Apple does not include functionality to use OS7/8/9 apps in OSX, then it will hurt them.
This doesn't sound like the usual troll, so I'm assuming you just really don't know what you are talking about. Apple's Classic environment (mentioned in the article) is provides exactly the functionality you seem to think is lacking in Mac OS X. It gives you the ability to run almost all OS 7/8/9 apps.
The reason Apple is dropping Mac OS 9 is no different from what Microsoft and other OS makers have done for years. Try installing Windows 3.1 on your latest snazzy desktop. Probably not going to find native drivers for that Gf4 Ti, or that DVD burner, etc... Apple doesn't care to write drivers to support their new hardware in an old operating system.
This isn't new, this isn't suprising, and this isn't going to hurt Apple.
Spyky
You *can* install OS9 afterwards (for Classic access).
Did a fresh install of Jaguar on my TiBook. Didn't even think of OS9 since all my apps are OS X approved. Wait, except for that damned Toast CD which is only OS9 (for the install). Popped out my OS9 CD that came with OS X 10.1.2, 'c' during startup, and installed a fresh copy of OS9.
Reboot back into Jaguar and launched Classic mode. It did its upgrade thang, and all was well.
(after installing Toast Titanium I was then able to apply the patch to make it an OS X app).
Apple is not explicitly doing anything to the hardware to prevent OS 9 booting that could otherwise occur. They are simply not bothering to update OS 9 to boot on the new hardware, since it is legacy code.
I think that people are missing some of this. Yes they are removing the ability from Mac OS X to boot into 9.
When a PC user buys an upgrade to their OS they now only have the ability to boot into that OS.
So this isn't anything really new in the computer world. A PC user circumvents this by installing a desired older OS on a seperate partition.
Apple's approach is just one of foward thinking. Why go back? Not really a bad or terrible thing to do. In all honesty Microsoft is guilty of the same thinking.
You could argue that even most linux distro's do the same as you are encouraged to upgrade your kernal after a new release.
To strive, to seek, but not to yield
We Mac users do not want change. We fear it. We would like to run one program at a time, like God intended.
This is an affront to Mom, Patriots everywhere, and just think of the children! This cannot be allowed to continue. OS 9 is what this country was founded on, and frankly, if you think otherwise, I think you may be aiding the terrorists. For it would take a terrorist's evil black heart to come up with such a hellish fate for Mac users. Deny our children the God Given Right to use OS 9!?
No! We will fight tooth and nail! From hill to dale! You will need to pry my OS 9 CD from my cold dead hands! There will never be Freedom until OS 9 is freed from it's oppressors! Join me now! We must win this battle FOR THE CHILDREN!
Sheesh. They should have dropped Mac OS in 1997.
They bought NeXT in 1996. They were ready to go with Rhapsody in 1997, but developers were unwilling to make the switch wholesale... so we've spent the last 5 years with Apple creating carbon, supporting both OSes, updating classic Mac OS, creating the classic environment, and doing everything they could to support the legacy Macintosh market.
Its been 5 frigging years. Its about time we moved over to Unix and dropped total support for the legacy software.
Its not like nobody had warning, and its not like classic won't still run fine.
I think they've been more than generous enough. Remember copeland was supposed to ship in 1997... they had reason to ship next as the new OS in 1997, as it would have moved them to a modern platform way back then.
They have spent, essentially, the entirety of the last 5 years software wise supporting legacy Macintosh.
Anyone still using OS 9 day to day is free to keep doing so, but don't expect new hardware to be hobbled to maintain that support.
You want a modern machine, use the modern OS.
Excuse me while I say "Sheesh!"
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
From the press release:
:^)
All new Macs sold since January 2002 have had Mac OS X factory-set as the default operating system. Over 75 percent of customers using these Macs have elected to keep Mac OS X as their default operating system...
Is nobody at Apple paying attention to this number? When Jobs acted like this was a good thing at the last MacWorld Expo in NY, my jaw hit the floor. In spite of the fact that Mac OS X is the default boot OS on new Macs, Mac users were going out of their way to switch to OS 9 as their boot-up OS.
This means a lot, if you think about it.
* Obviously one-fourth of new Mac users are not using any OS X specific applications. There's no "Futuristic box" in OS 9 to parallel Classic in OS X.
* This quarter of new Mac buyers aren't happy with the "Classic from within X" compromise, for whatever reason.
* This number doesn't count the people who simply don't know how to switch to OS 9 as their default boot disk. That might sound crazy, but in one usability test for our software, we had a user insert the CD upside-down, and not by accident but by ignorance. You can, unfortunately, never underestimate your spectrum of users. Think of how many new Mac users, if they knew of OS 9, might prefer it.
* This also means that the number of OS 9-only users is still pretty solid. Take the users of all the Macs out there now that are still running that won't run OS X -- even if all the people buying new Macs are old Mac users you're only reducing their numbers by 75% the number of new Macs sold. That's pretty slow. Heaven forbid some of that nearly 25% are new Mac users are choosing to boot into OS 9 from the start! It's a hard sale for Apple. The most users in the Mac market, believe it or not, are still on OS 9 or below.
Regardless, and in a complete Jekell/Hyde move, I think Apple's doing the right thing, at least from the point of view of Apple's continued financial success. People must be forced to move to the new OS for a couple of reasons. First, if the users move, the pushers (software developers) will follow. Second, if Apple wants to move to x86, they aren't going to be bringing Classic along with them.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
This isn't about gaining marketshare, this is about putting the screws to major developers who are dragging their feet (like Quark).
Apple's done this before with success. Remember USB? It came to the PC world first, but nobody moved on it because the PC manufacturers weren't getting rid of legacy ports, so peripheral manufacturers stayed on the "Most Compatible" route of PS/2 and Serial. It took Apple introducing USB-only iMacs to jump-start the USB peripheral market.
I mean, good grief, how long did it take the PC industry to drop 5 1/4" floppy drives? The 3.5" came out with the first Mac in 1984, and 10 years later PC's still had both drives. And the 3.5" drive is definitely a technology that has overstayed its welcome; but the fact that it continues to hang on means that suitable replacements took much longer to come to market.
It's good that Apple is driving their market, not just trying to make everything backwards-compatible until we have this overbloated OS running on overbloated hardware. Apple's got the balls to do what most of the PC world won't do. Believe it or not, the market will adapt; Apple has proven this.
Wanna run legacy DOS games? Drop a new hard drive in that old Pentium 233 you have laying around. Or buy VirtualPC for Windows. You've got options. But don't suggest that an entire sector of the tech market should slow progress because you want to play a "golden oldie".
If they're going to kill the ability to boot into OS 9, they better find a way to:
(1) Give Mac OS X the ability to upgrade firmware, whether it be the computer itself or hardware components. Currently you can only flash firmware or ROM updates from Mac OS 9
(2) Get bootable Mac OS X rescue disks for things like Norton Utilities or Diskwarrior, because sometimes fsck -y doesn't solve everything
(3) Update all Mac OS X software components so that they are as complete as the OS 9 equivalents. For example, Apple System Profiler. So far the Jaguar version still doesn't tell you everything like the OS 9 one does, like the Uni-North CPU version, which tells you if an older Mac can accept a dual-cpu upgrade.
The great thing about having OS 9 bootable is that you could use it for troubleshooting.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
isn't Classic that interpreter/emulator for OS 9?
No.
Don't think of Classic as an emulator, like Virtual PC. Think of it instead as just a program. Mac OS 9 was a shared-memory, cooperative multitasking system. Classic implements that entire system as a UNIX process. Within the process's address space, you have the entire Mac OS 9 operating system and all your apps. But the apps aren't running under emulation. They're executing native PowerPC binary code. In some cases, apps run faster under Classic than they did under OS 9.
Of course, some stuff had to change. Since Classic isn't really an OS, but just a process running under UNIX, it can't talk directly to the hardware. Some software-- not much, but some-- can't work under Classic because of this.
But it's not an emulator. It's more like vmware than it is like an emulator.
Ha!
1) When she can afford to upgrade she will. Its not like any of these programs just stop working today because Apple announced the death of OS 9. She can still use these programs until she can upgrade. And all of those work perfectly in classic mode anyways.
2) Trust me when I say this. As a serious graphic designer, Linux is not an option yet. Two words: Colour Management. This is something that Apple is vastly superior. Maybe one day Linux will be better, but it doesn't look like it'll be any time soon.
Really, this seems more like flamebait than anything else. She can afford to purchase a PC version of Photoshop for Windows to use with the crossover plugin but she can't afford to update it for the Mac.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Well, that's because MS dropped NT/2000, a really good OS, in favor of XP... primarily so that they could ram Passport down everyone's throats and start shifting to their .NET business model ("Oh, you don't OWN that copy of Office, you simply rent it from us. Now, start paying by the minute.")
Apple, on the other hand, dropped the ability to boot into an obsolete OS, but included an emulator in the system to run older apps. Tell me, can your P4 run Win 3.1? or Win 95 even? And do you have drivers for your DVD burner and graphics cards available?
This is no different.
-T
Not so anecdotal evidence would suggest that users are not taking up OS X in droves. How anyone could use OS 9 at all is beyond me but that's the reality. Apple has already told developers to only do OS X development. The sad fact is that for the market share apple has, doing (what in the case of the drivers at least) is a total re-write is not a super high priority for alot of companies.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
I bought a Power Macintosh 8600/250 in 1997...
...AND IT WOULDN'T EVEN BOOT INTO System 4!!!!!!
WTF. How is anyone supposed to get anything done? I can't even play StuntCopter or Cairo Shootout in the right resolution/screen depth! MacPaint becomes garbled and unstable under the "Finder", really just the damn MultiFinder in disguise! What a marketing ploy! Thanks ALOT, Apple!!!!!
</FUNNY>
<INSIGHTFUL LIKELY="maybe">
Seriously, if tons of people are worried about paying thousands to replace old shareware programs on the Mac with new commercial software, why not just write to your favorate Mac OS X shareware developer and request they create a replacement product? Be sure to elaborate on exactly what it would replace, and why such a thing would be popular with whoever needs that particular product. Panic and Ambrosia are probably two good places to start, and I'm sure there are hundreds more.
Trust me, the Mac shareware scene WANTS your feedback.
</INSIGHTFUL>
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
It would be easy to make new machines non-9 bootable if they wanted to. While obviously new machines don't yet exist to know what they will or won't do, all versions of Mac OS since 7.1check hardware doing bootup to see if they're supposed to load on that machine, and if they're not, they put up a message that says "get a newer version of the OS". If a newer version hadn't yet been released, the OS the system came with had a "System Enabler " file which permitted booting on that machine, but a vanilla version of the same system (which didn't have the enabler) would not. Often this enabler would contain important patches to support hardware on that machine.
Their latest machines evidently identify themselves to vanilla OS 9.2.2 as supported hardware, so it loads ok. Their future machines may not work so well. Or, as you say, they may simply not have OS 9 installed on them, but a 9.2.2 CD (if you already have one, since they're nearly unavailable as a new product even now) *might* install on them.
But I doubt it. By ditching 9 support, they free themselves to make whatever architectural changes they like to the hardware without having to support it in both operating systems. It may be possible for someone to hack 9 to boot on new hardware, and they probably will. But if there are major changes on the board, it may not do much good.
By abandoning 9, they also are preparing people for a possible transition to another CPU at some point, which 9 certainly won't support (but Classic might be able to, if they add an instruction set emulator).
One final comment: while superficially similar to what Apple has always done when they introduce new hardware, it is worth considering that X is a completely different operating system than 9, and that has never happened before. Even with all of its changes, System 7 was still an evolution of System 6, and most software still ran on it -- probably
ALL software that followed the rules. Not so here. In my experience, MOST things work in Classic, but some things simply do not. Astarte CD-Copy (which is out of production anyway, since Apple bought Astarte and rolled the technology into their iApps) is a great utility, but it touches hardware, so it can't work in Classic, and there's no equivalent. As many noted, many games simply don't perform well in Classic.
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't do this, while I'm suprised they're doing it this quickly, but it was obvious that it was coming some day. But I'm also just saying it's not a case of "They've always done this." I don't think there's been a case where they've introduced new hardware that is incompatible with the percentage of software that will not work correctly in Classic.
(-1 Troll)
X as in 10 times slower
10.1 ran nicely on my 300Mhz blueberry iBook. Not as fast as OS 9, but certainly not 10 times slower. Haven't toyed with Jaguar yet since my HDD died on me (Long story involving water, beer and electricity) but if the reports of it's speed improvements are anything to consider, it sure as hell isn't 10 times slower.
10 times less apps
I have never been at a loss for aplications. Perhaps you could elighten me as to which apps you can not get (or replace) under X.
10 times the number of hacks apple has gone through to make a unix like OS to run mac things
As opposed to how many hacks the linux community has instituted to get Windows things to run under linux?
you people think that anything commercial that takes unix serioulsy must be god sent
Usualy it is. Commecrial support for *NIX is a good thing. It provides a sense of seriousness that give *NIX the immage it needs to be taken seriously in other places.
you run your silly linux dist and talk to a bunch of other losers who run their stupid linux shit
Now I know that Linux is challenging to get up and running, but it's not nice to call names just because other people are smarter than you and have had more success. Go back to running your Windows 95 box and finish your homework. Recess is starting soon.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
DOS 6 does, but does your latest whiz-bang GeForce 4 work on it?
What about Windows 3.1? Does your USB printer work on it? Does your SB Audigy put out 5.1 channel Dolby Digital on it? How about that nifty Firewire camcorder? Can you watch those DVD's on it?