Mac OS X Cracked For PCs Again

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica and The Register are reporting the Apple Kernel 10.4.8 has been cracked using Apple's publicly available source trees. This is the first time Apple was hit by hackers again since Maxxuss silently left the scene.The funny thing about this is the hacker who cracked OSx has released his sources according to APSL. He told Ars Technica in an interview that he did this because he believes in freedom of information, but will this now harm Apple's opensourceness?" From the article: "Unfortunately, free and legal are not necessarily the same thing, and the EULA for OS X requires Mac hardware. However, there is an interesting comment on the blog, one that asserts the requirement of Mac hardware is a "post-sale" restriction. Such a restriction may not be applicable in certain countries, such as those of the European Union. Expect to see what Apple Legal thinks about that shortly."

Comments

According to Slashdot's front page...

[From A Far Away Land]

Apple need to collaborate with Microsoft, and make the Apple Genuine Advantage. As a leader in the field of pissing off customers, Microsoft can proudly show Apple how to protect its interests against those nasty hackers.

Re:According to Slashdot's front page...

[The Mad Debugger]

I'm pretty sure the license his comment was published under didn't allow modifications! You're going to jail!

use the easy button

[User 956]

However, there is an interesting comment on the blog, one that asserts the requirement of Mac hardware is a "post-sale" restriction.

If it's a post-sale restriction, and you're not buying it, problem solved.

Apple gets to get with the program

[jarich]

I bought my Mac ~because~ I had played with the "free as in bittorrent" version last fall. It ran great on my Opteron desktop and my Intel based laptop. After a long weekend, I decided to switch.

OS X is a great OS. If more people could try it out, there'd be a lot more converts.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[sky289hawk1]

Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. They make the software to sell their hardware.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[dubbreak]

Apple is a hardware company, not a software company.

That is true but that probably isn't why they aren't doing it. If they aren't doing it, it is because the people good at crunching financial numbers and analyzing potential market share are saying it won't increase their overall profit and value to stockholders.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[Overly Critical Guy]

Just because you think piracy is "free advertising" doesn't mean Apple should magically give up all its intellectual property and copyrights.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[IntergalacticWalrus]

No, Apple is a systems company. What they sell you is a full system, consisting of both hardware and software components that were made to support each other.

In this PC-centric world we now live in, people seem to have a problem understanding this concept, but go back at least at least a decade and this practice of selling "systems" was the norm, until the PC killed them all in the name of commodity. Amiga, Sun, SGI, Apple, NeXT, etc... Now Apple is the only system vendor that's still in the systems business. All others have either gone bankrupt, stopped selling systems altogether, or still attempt to sell what appears to be their older systems, only they're really just overpriced x86 boxen that run Windows or Linux.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[Overly Critical Guy]

Playing cards or video games, Nintendo still sells game hardware. The reason that people always explain that Apple is a hardware company is because it's a fundamental strategy difference from a software company like Microsoft. Apple makes its money on its hardware, and the software is used to increase the value of the hardware to the consumer. A company like Microsoft relies solely on software which is cheaper than hardware (Vista notwithstanding...just kidding), so they have to support as much hardware as they possibly can to make up the difference. Microsoft's hardware ventures--the XBox and the XBox 360--have never generated profit, and neither will the Zune on launch.

So it wouldn't just be a magical change in focus for Apple to become a software company. It would require an entirely new business model with entirely new software products that support entirely new platforms. It would kill the company, and nobody would want it to happen anyway because Macs are fantastic pieces of hardware that run a very stable operating system.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[Bing Tsher E]

Sun still sells systems. With their own processor, even.

(Apple always just packaged somebody else's processor)

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[speculatrix]

and IBM too, just not for the common man.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[PlusFiveTroll]

Apple is not a hardware company, they are an experience company. The experience they want there customers to have is a unified desktop on at least semi reliable hardware.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[metamatic]

they could release Tiger 10.4 for generic x86 machines for a very low price (say $50).

If you think Apple's margin on a computer is $50, you really need to think harder.

In reality, it's comfortably over 25%. So they'd need to price OS X at $300 or more just to make up for the money they were no longer making selling people a $1500 or more computer.

But it's worse than that. If they sold OS X for generic PCs, they'd have to support OS X on generic PCs, including all the shoddy PC hardware out there. They'd need to spend more on support, more on drivers, more on testing, and so on. There's a reason why Microsoft is so late shipping Vista, it's not just because of bad project management and poor decisions.

So realistically, they'd have to bump the price of OS X up to $400-500. And at that price, nobody would buy it.

Yes, if 50% of the PC market ran OS X, they could sell it for $50 and maintain today's profit levels. The problem is that there's no way to get to there from here without going through bankruptcy.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[JustSaying]

As long as Apple is happy remaining a niche player they should continue to restrict their OS to their hardware. I think it time for Stevie boy and his pet, OS to come out and play with the big bad bully across the street. It's time to see if OS can live in the wild. People bitch about the bully, Windows but at least it plays in the real world with almost every type of hardware you can throw at it. Poor little OS X remains tied up in Stevies small yard. Never getting a chance to see if it has what it takes to challenge the bully across the street. Stevie let little OS out. I think it would be a fight worth watching and I for one think OS X might just win.

Re:Apple gets to get with the program

[mstone]

Broadly speaking, 20% of computer sales generate 80% of the profit, while the remaining 80% of sales only generate the remaining 20% of profit.

Taking those numbers into account, Apple just reported something like $580 million in profit for the last quarter. Gateway (just slightly larger in market share) posted an $80 million loss. Dell (#1 in sales, moving roughly five times as many units as Apple) posted a $510 million profit for its last quarter. So we have two facts:

1 - Dell and Gateway (combined) sold roughly six times as many computers as Apple last quarter.

2 - Apple made roughly $150 million more profit than Dell and Gateway (combined) last quarter.

All in all, I think Apple will be delighted to remain a 'niche player' as long as they can rake in 80% of the money while only having to produce, ship, and support 20% of the machines.

If Apple was smart...

[pestilence669]

They'd let people install it on anything they want... just make it "illegal" to do so. It's not like Windows' market share was achieved only with legal licensed copies.

Re:If Apple was smart...

[goombah99]

daily Apple users are not going to commit themselves to a platform that is just one software update away from suddenly not functioning, or ones for which the apple drivers just don't work. On otherhand for people too cheap to buy apples, and who just want occasional use in an unmaintined state, apple should be happy. It's like throwing a market share bone to the their third pary software developers, and courting future hardware customers. I can imagine that there is sliver of market share for people forced to use apples at work who have a PC at home that just dont have the money to buy an apple YET. I can imagine the hordes of thrird worl countries for whom income levels never will achieve mac status. Neither of these is going to hurt mac sales.

Re:If Apple was smart...

[feldsteins]

I think we really need to be careful not to overestimate the influence and power of nerddom. it may be true that a segment of computer users might play with an unsupported version of OS X on their PCs, they do not constitute a significant number of people. You may make the argument that these nerds are the most important constituency, but I do not think they are influential enough to make up for their infinitesimal numbers.

(You see this kind of nerd fallacy all the time. A record company dude just said the other day that the era of the music CD as we know it is dead. It took 2 nanoseconds for nerds to counter: CDs are here to say because of DRM and that their opposition to it was going to halt the migration away from this media in its tracks. Which is of course nonsense. Most people have no idea what DRM is and, until and unless it bites them in the ass, do not care.)

Re:If Apple was smart...

[Watts Martin]

I don't think Apple is ignorant of the interest in running OS X on non-Apple hardware; in fact, I'd say it's a safe bet that somebody in Apple has projections of what the effects on their market share, on their own hardware sales, etc., etc. would be.

But as I've commented in earlier discussions on this topic, I also suspect Apple has projections on just what would happen if they turned Microsoft into a full-blown, no-pretense-of-partnership enemy. Because if Apple ever released OS X for non-Apple Intel hardware, Microsoft would perceive it -- correctly -- as the most serious assault on the Windows platform that they've ever faced. No offense is intended to Linux and *BSD variants by that; it's a simple recognition that OS X has much more "end user" friendliness and a much wider range of commercial applications (including some pretty big name ones) than any other Unix relative ever has, and Apple has one of the highest brand recognitions in the world.

Given how Microsoft has reacted to much less dangerous competition in the past, what do you think their response would be?

Yes, I know you were suggesting Apple could just release an OS X that had only license restrictions and "just happened" to be able to run on non-Apple hardware, nudge nudge wink wink. But if Apple sold enough copies of OS X to non-Mac owners to actually affect their bottom line, that would be enough to attract the attention of the industry press -- and of Microsoft. And at that point, if Apple didn't take very loud definitive actions to put a stop to it, it'd be effectively throwing down the gauntlet just as much as slapping "Now compatible with your Dell, HP and your crappy white box PC!" stickers on every OS X Leopard box.

It's nice to dream, but an OS X that just breezily installs on non-Apple hardware won't happen unless Apple decides they're willing to engage in a fight to the death with Microsoft.

Re:No GUI

[wo1verin3]

It doesn't say it because it isn't true.

From TFA:

I had to remove a key which you need to reinsert if you want to run its GUI, due to legal issues. I called it the "magicpoem" maybe you got the point now. The hex for it is around so don't mail me about it, I want [won't] spread anything illegal.

Darwin ONLY

[diamondsw]

All this does is give you Darwin. Its hardly a "hack" - just compiling Darwin/x86, which you've been able to do with Apple's blessing for years (save a brief interlude when kernel sources weren't ready yet).

Now if they get around the binary signing on critical GUI components (Finder, WindowServer, etc) then I'll be more impressed.

EULA

[Phroggy]

So here's what I'm wondering.

Apple's EULA says Mac OS X can only be used on an "Apple-labeled computer." But what does that really mean, legally? I've heard some people suggest that if you stick your own label that says "Apple" on a PC, then it should count as being "Apple-labeled," but I'm assuming the real meaning is "a computer that has been labeled by Apple."

So, what if you buy an old Blue & White G3 tower, remove the motherboard, and install a P4 or Core 2 motherboard (along with CPU and RAM)? Can this machine still be considered "Apple-labeled"? Surely you can upgrade the hard drive or RAM without voiding the EULA; which other components are OK to replace before the result can no longer be legally considered "Apple-labeled"?

Of course I'm talking about using a legally purchased retail copy of Mac OS X.

Re:EULA

[nsayer]

True, but irrelevant. The GP is correct. You cannot buy a copy of Panther for x86, except with a new mac. As a sibling poster said, this situation will change when Leopard is released, but for now everyone running OSX x86 other than on Apple hardware has pinched it. That means that discussions about the legality of hacking it are moot until then.

Cracked = wrong word!

[PhoenixK7]

This is really not a case of anything being cracked. The source code was available, all this guy did was remove the requirements for particular hardware. Consequently, as we've all known before the gui doesn't work without the checks that were implemented, and you still need something illegal to get it going as an actual OS X install... all you have here is Darwin running out of the same tree as OS X. I'm sure Apple knew this would happen as soon as they released the kernel source.

Post Sale Restrictions

[popo]

"Post sale restrictions" are IMHO the legal flaw in just about *every* EULA.

You've gone to the store, you've purchased a product, you've driven home, you've opened the product and are in the process of installing the
product and WHAMMO -- you're forced to agree to something after you've already expended time, energy and money towards posession of that
product. If you disagree with the EULA, you'll need to expend further time, energy and money (and bereaucratic frustration) in order to
undo the financial transaction and receive compensation. (Ever try taking XP back to Staples and saying you didn't agree with the EULA?).

This is a form of trickery and extortion that goes far beyond bait-and-switch. It is a transaction in which 'good faith' on the part of the
manufacturer is non-existent. EULA's are legal documents which cannot be given due diligence (because the expense of said diligence would vastly
exceed the price of the product), and they are agreed to by minors, the elderly and consumers with no legal background every day. The price
for disagreement is more wasted effort, more lost time and more lost money.

Post Sale Agreements should be illegal.

Re:Post Sale Restrictions

[Fearless Freep]

So you buy your copy of OS/X and take it home and open the box and suddenly find out that you need to buy a Mac to go with it?

Re:Post Sale Restrictions

[Budenny]

The problem, at least in the EU, is not the Eula, or whether you have understood it, been given notice of it etc. The problem is trying to restrict the use you make of a product once you have bought it. The EU generally has regarded this as anti competitive practice.

So, take the example of Wolf garden tools. They make handles and a bunch of stuff that snaps onto them. There is nothing to stop them making them of a different fit. There is nothing to stop them voiding the warranty on their tools and their handles if used with other suppliers tools or handles. You cannot, in the EU, sell people things on condition they use them only in certain ways, and have that be legally enforceable.

If people know different, give a few examples, real cases where they have been upheld.

No matter what it says in any Eula they sell them with, and no matter what you sign in the store pre sale or as a condition of sale, no court in the EU is ever going to uphold any action against you for using the stuff with a different handle or tool.

Similarly, Apple may make OSX unusable with non-Macs. They may refuse to support it. But if it is installable on non-Apple stuff, and as long as you have violated no other laws in getting it (copyright or anti-hacking laws) then you are going to be legally in the clear.

A company cannot tell you what to do with something you have bought, once you've bought it. Software, hardware, whatever. This is a post sale restriction on use, and there is some possibility that pretending in a Eula to have the ability to impose such conditions when you must know quite well that you do not, is contrary to Fair Trading laws.

This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer.

Not news.

[argent]

Um, they *did* make the operating system (Darwin) OSS. How did you think the source you're looking at was released in the first place? This hasn't been news for five years at least.

They haven't made the GUI shell (Quartz, Aqua, etc...) that runs on top of it OSS, but then neither have all the companies that make accelerated X servers and other system software for Linux made their software OSS.

Post sell restriction

[AgNO3]

I am pretty sure it says right on the outside of the box that it requires a Macintosh computer. I think that makes it a pre-sale condition.

Re:Interesting.

[dr.badass]

That said, how do they get around by not making osx oss? Just curious.

The answer is right in front of you. There is no "getting around" anything. The GPL requires you to make the source of your modified versions available. It doesn't require you to make your completely unrelated code (i.e. the rest of Mac OS X) GPL.

This is just a new "OpenDarwin".

[argent]

This isn't illegal, unethical, or surprising. It's interesting and encouraging, that OpenDarwin's frustration and shutdown hasn't stalled the continued support of Darwin on non-Apple hardware, but people have been turning Apple's open source releases into bootable operating systems for years.

What's the big deal? That if you take things a few steps further you can use this to run the GUI on top of Darwin on Intel instead of just Power PC? Well, yes, that's a big deal, but that's not possible with what this guy's released. It's not XPostFacto.

cracked? "hit by hackers"???

[oohshiny]

Give me a break. Porting the Darwin kernel and then running an OS X userland on top of it is not "cracking". It may be in violation of Apple's EULA, but I really don't see any reason to get pushed out of shape about it.

Apple will do whatever they will do in response to it. If they're smart, they're just going to leave it alone: in the end, this really doesn't matter, since people by Macs for the whole package; OS X itself really isn't all that special.

Re:No GUI

[Overly Critical Guy]

Stuff like this is going to make Apple bring out the big guns when it comes to TPM integration in OS X Leopard. Pro apps like Logic 7 Pro have never been cracked, so Apple's got people who know how to do copyright protection. I suspect once Leopard is out, we'll never hear about "OSx86" again.

Re:Apple 0x86 Mac = Expensive, Boring 0x86 PC

[Overly Critical Guy]

Wow, so much FUD. "overpriced" even though the Mac Pro is $1,000 less than the equivalent Dell and the new MacBook Pros are also less than the equivalent Dells. You even end with the old "iPod users just want to look cool" canard.

There are many ways Apple can (and probably will) tie OS X to Mac hardware. They've got people who can do it (to date, there has never been a crack for Logic 7 Pro and its USB dongle).

Re:Apple 0x86 Mac = Expensive, Boring 0x86 PC

[Steffan]

As many people in this forum have noted, the 0x86 Mac is just an expensive plain-vanilla 0x86 PC that you can buy from Dell at a much lower price. There really is no way for Apple to "lock" its MacOS and to prevent it from being run on a Dell PC. Also, there really is no way for Microsoft to "lock" Vista and to prevent it from being run on an 0x86 Mac.

You keep using "0x86". I think you mean "x86", denoting [3456]86 chips. 0x86 is the standard representation for the hexadecimal equivalent of the number '134'. :)

Re:Post Sale?

[Trillan]

If you installed it on a Mac, you installed it on a computer you had a license to use it on.

I'm not talking about how the discs are built, I'm talking about how the license works. Your Mac purchase includes a license for Mac OS. Any particular retail box updates one license to the version in the box. There's basically no way to buy a "full" license for Mac OS except for buying a Mac.

Re:No GUI

[dolson]

Stop being overly critical, guy!

Re:Linux on a Mac

[snuf23]

Wallpaper with a cute Penguin on it.

It's the branding, stupid.

[ZombieRoboNinja]

So many comments say things like this and get modded Insightful. Apple doesn't want unmaintained, illegal copies of OSX out there because it weakens Apple's branding. For every person who gets "converted" after downloading a hacked copy of OSX, there's another guy who tries it out, gets some weird driver conflict because he's running non-Apple hardware, and says, "Hey, this thing is just as buggy and confusing as Windows!" And moreover, human nature dictates that people like to bitch more than they like to evangelize, so it's the second guy who's gonna tell all his friends what a piece of crap OSX is.

Re:Linux on a Mac

[Ash-Fox]

What was the Mac lacking that Linux has?

In reality, I can get most stuff I like on Linux on MacOSX using Fink. Or on windows using Cygwin... But it really feels like a cheat (not to mention it's slower for some reason).

Of course, show a Windows user or a Mac user that you're running KDE ontop of their sacred OS and it's all suddenly, "Why are you doing that!?".

The same people get really upset and iffy when you aren't using the same office applications, paint programs and so on too. Me? I couldn't careless what people use, I know what I like to use.

Things I can do on Linux that MacOSX and Windows can't:

I wrote a simple script that simply switches between wireless and wired networks automatically without disconnecting any of my existing connections on IRC and so on.

I plug in the Ethernet cable, a script automatically starts and disables wi-fi card, duplicates NIC settings from the wi-fi card (IP address and so on) then brings up Ethernet. My applications just continue running, still connected to servers and such. If I pull out the ethernet cable, Wi-fi starts up, connects to the relevant network (if it's there) and my applications still aren't disconnected from anything.

This is really useful for me when I need to move around, but every now and then, I need to connect to a wired network so I can do network intensive tasks quickly, such as speedy backups, huge file copies, low latency network gaming, conference calling (works fine over wi-fi, but artifacts sometimes occur).

The other thing is, whenever I need to use a scanner, tablet, Bluetooth dongle, wi-fi card -- anything. I can just plug it in, and it works, no need to download drivers, configure the thing. It just works almost instantly. Now, MacOSX? I find a lot of hardware doesn't "just work" on that, if it works at all. I have a Bluetooth dongle that crashes the OS, but works fine on Windows and Linux.
Windows on the other hand.. Always asking me drivers, it rarely finds drivers automatically from the windows update site, the drivers that come on the CD don't work for some reason (designed for XP SP1 and doesn't work on SP2 -- manufacturer's website uses some borked javascript that doesn't let me download the drivers -- BLAH). I just can't use any off-the-shelf equipment immediately with non-linux OSes.

I admit there is definitely hardware that doesn't work with Linux, but so far. I've had far more problems with MacOSX and Windows.

The windows games I can get working under Wine, run often faster than I ever got under Windows on the same hardware -- including some wouldn't even work under Windows on my hardware (second life) -- but worked fine under Wine and Linux (now second life has a Linux port which is even better).

Things I can't do on Linux:

Play every windows game.
Run a program equivalent in functionality to Satscape. .. I honestly can't think of anything else now.

Apple retail box OS: 'Full Retail' or 'Upgrade'?

[Anonymous Freak]

That's the big question. I'm looking at the EULA of my 'Retail box' copy of 10.4, and it says nothing about requiring a valid license from an older version of the Mac OS. Windows 'Upgrade' EULAs state this. They require a legally valid existing license for a prior version of Windows. The OS X license merely states that you must have an 'Apple-labeled' computer; but declines to define 'Apple-labeled'.

I have an old Power Mac G3. I have upgraded the memory, processor, and video card. Yet it is still undeniably 'Apple' hardware. If I remove the original Power Mac G3 motherboard, and insert a motherboard from an Intel Mac mini, replacing the memory, processor, and video card, (but keeping the original hard drive,) it is still Apple hardware, right? My license to have 10.4 on that computer is still valid, right? (After all, the mini came with a valid license as well.) But now I'm running an x86 version of 10.4. If I take the processor and RAM from the mini's motherboard, and put them in a 'generic' x86 motherboard that supports said processors, am I still using Apple hardware? I'm using the same processor as I was before, the same memory, the same hard drive. The only thing that has changed is the motherboard. (Say I wanted a real hardware parallel port or serial port for some reason, or I got a motherboard with a PCI Express slot.) Is my license still legal?

How about if I take the guts of the Power Mac G3, and put them into a generic ATX PC case? It doesn't have an Apple label on the outside, but it's 100% Apple hardware on the inside. Is it 'Apple-labeled'? If so, then what if I follow with the process above, replacing with a Mac mini motherboard, then replacing the Mac mini motherboard. Now, the only Apple-original hardware would be the processor, memory, and hard drive. But I started with completely legal versions of everything. Does mere moving of parts and replacing of parts make the license illegal?

Nowhere does Apple define 'Apple-labeled'.

Apple's OS 9 'retail' license speciically said that you had to install it on a computer that contained an existing legally licensed copy of the Mac OS. Meaning that OS 9's retail box was really an 'upgrade' license.

Re:Apple 0x86 Mac = Expensive, Boring 0x86 PC

[TheRaven64]

Before the i486, the Intel Architecture chips were the 8086 (and the 8088, but it was just a crippled 8086), the 80186, the 80286 and the 80386. The standard way of describing a member of this family was 80x86. Perhaps the grandparent just has a defective 8 key that only works every other press...

Re:Apple 0x86 Mac = Expensive, Boring 0x86 PC

[PygmySurfer]

Apple must exit the computer hardware business as quickly as possible. The powerful competitive forces marshalled by a multi-billion-dollary industry will destroy Apple. Who wants to buy an overpriced computer from Apple?

OK, who gave the guys over at Gartner Slashdot accounts?

Re:Linux on a Mac

[diamondsw]

I wrote a simple script that simply switches between wireless and wired networks automatically without disconnecting any of my existing connections on IRC and so on.

I plug in the Ethernet cable, a script automatically starts and disables wi-fi card, duplicates NIC settings from the wi-fi card (IP address and so on) then brings up Ethernet. My applications just continue running, still connected to servers and such. If I pull out the ethernet cable, Wi-fi starts up, connects to the relevant network (if it's there) and my applications still aren't disconnected from anything.

This is really useful for me when I need to move around, but every now and then, I need to connect to a wired network so I can do network intensive tasks quickly, such as speedy backups, huge file copies, low latency network gaming, conference calling (works fine over wi-fi, but artifacts sometimes occur).

Mac OS X does this automatically, without needing that little script you wrote. Just give both interfaces the same IP information, and it will seamlessly switch to whichever is higher in the list of connections.

Once again, all kinds of power, and a GUI that makes it trivial to use.

The other thing is, whenever I need to use a scanner, tablet, Bluetooth dongle, wi-fi card -- anything. I can just plug it in, and it works, no need to download drivers, configure the thing. It just works almost instantly. Now, MacOSX? I find a lot of hardware doesn't "just work" on that, if it works at all. I have a Bluetooth dongle that crashes the OS, but works fine on Windows and Linux.

Not exactly persuasive, since it's personal experience. My experience has been that pretty much anything that's USB or Firewire just works, including such dongles, serial adapters, modems, printers, etc. Most PCI/AGP/PCI-Express works as well, although that is more spotty. A lot of that is thanks to class drivers, and a lot is thanks to open source (CUPS and Gimp-Print, for instance).

At the same time, I can sit here and spin tales of how my MegaRAID adapter in my server wasn't recognized by several Linux install CD's, then was broken in the kernel for a few versions, and when I finally switched to an IBM ServeRAID 3L, it wasn't supported by Windows XP!

In 20 years of using the Mac and 10 years of Windows and Linux experience, I'd say you're most likely to get something to work with full functionality on Windows. You may have problems and conflicts, but full feature support is a priority. You're most likely to get most functionality on Mac OS X. Some things are only partially supported (printer or scanner features, for instance), and there are occasional devices that don't work (video cards needing Mac-specific firmware - why is that?). As for Linux, all I can say is it's very hit or miss, distro to distro, version to version. Things break much more often on Linux. It might just need some new package or config tweak, but running a system update (synaptic, yum, emerge, etc) is sometimes like russian roulette. I backup my Linux system fully before applying updates - I don't need to with OS X or Windows.

Mac Pro != MacBook Pro

[CatOne]

You're using the wrong products. The Mac Pro is the desktop system with the dual Woodcrest processors.

The MacBook Pro (laptop) isn't cheaper than a Dell notebook. Though the new ones are closer -- and they come with sufficient RAM (2 GB), hallelujah!

Re:Linux on a Mac

[pasamio]

Indeed, in fact it is amazingly seemless. I started a transfer on a 802.11B network, and the file chugged along at B speeds. I then flicked on a 802.11G AP and after a few seconds it switched over and started transferring at the 802.11G speeds. I then plugged in my ethernet cable and the Activity Monitor jumped up in the massive speed boost. But then I pulled out my ethernet cable, this caused the transfer to pause for a bit and then it picked up the pace again. This is amazing to watch, doesn't matter what you use (even SMB to Windows boxes), it just seems to work. Very impressed by how simple it is to set up.