Bounty For Booting XP on the Intel iMac

An anonymous reader writes "The race is on. You can try to get the bounty for booting Windows XP on iMac. At this moment there is $2773 waiting for the winner. However several people have brickified their iMacs when playing with EFI." I imagine those tech support calls are hysterical ;)

Comments

For the last time...

[copponex]

If I could have a dual core machine with a really nice graphics card, and the machine was also cool, quiet, and attractive for $1300, and I could boot any OS I wanted on it (OS X, Linux, XP), I think I don't qualify as perverse. The iMac is a compact and powerful machine, and there's nothing available like it at the moment. Furthermore, give me the choice between carrying around two laptops or one (especially for developers or on-site technicians), can you possibly guess which one would be less expensive?

So, please, just drop this joke. It's been told a million times. If you don't have anything useful to say, just save your breath.

Re:Why? Seriously

[LurkerXXX]

Right, because no one else has other software needs than yours.

Re:Why? Seriously

[NutscrapeSucks]

Turn your argument around. Nobody really "needs" a Mac in the first place. We could get everything we need to get done on a standard Windows PC, but instead we buy Macintoshes because we *want* to, not because we need to.

Surely you will admit that there are some very popular Windows packages that have not been ported to the Mac. As well about a million inhouse and vertical software packages designed for Windows. A lot of people in the Mac community see this as something that would be legitimately useful to them, and not just "because it's there". They're doing this because they think it would add value to their Mac system.

Re:How to report a brickified iMac to Apple

[squiggleslash]

Or alternatively, you could call them and tell them what actually happened. That way they can diagnose the fault, and fix it. In the event that the person you talk to is someone who reads Slashdot and is therefore convinced that someone experimenting with different commands on their computer is actually doing something illegal, immoral, or just "against the Man(tm)" and that Apple is perfectly within their rights to not honour a warranty under such circumstances, you ask to speak to their supervisor.

There is no reason why typing commands at a prompt should completely brickify a computer. Result in data loss? Yeah. Mean you have to reinstall the OS? That's fine. But render a computer utterly incapable of being restored to a usable state by the user? Absolutely not. We're not talking about plugging the AC cable into the Firewire slot here, or dropping it from the top of the Empire State Building, we're just talking about experimenting with the subsystem that boots the computer in order to try to, legitimately, boot another operating system.

This isn't a slam against Apple here. I suspect these machines do, indeed, have a by-pass somewhere in them to restore the firmware (there's already a supposed fix circulating which may actually be the solution), and there are plenty of companies that also make it relatively easy to brick their systems (would it be too fucking much to add a $5 ROM to your $800 laptops that contains a "good" version of the firmware in case there's a problem with the flash?); far from it: I have great difficulty believing Apple would refuse to honour a warranty over such an issue, and I suspect, ultimately, they'll have a KB article up soon enough ensuring users can fix the issue themselves. In the event they do not, I'd be surprised if they're not seeing this as a design flaw, rather than a user issue.