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OQO Hacker Claims World's Smallest OS X Machine
TechRadar writes "A hacker has turned his OQO ultraportable into the world's smallest Mac running Leopard. 'I will warn you this project is not for the plug and play crowd but definitely do-able,' the hacker, 'TRF' says. Interesting, given the OQO was designed by ex-Apple employees." It might run Mac OS X, but one thing this OQO is not is a Mac.
My iPod Touch is running a cut-down version of OS X, and it's even smaller.
Given that the OS is what most people interact with all day, is it really so wrong to call it a Mac? Most the purported Mac advantages are to do with usability after all. You're certainly getting more of the Mac experience than a PC one.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It might well be time for them to consider doing what they could have done years ago, realeasing a general version of Leopard that will run on non-Apple PC's. They might even consider doing an "Apple Certified" program for Dell and other companies wanting to offer OS X as an option for their customers. If their hardware is truly superior, then it won't cost them much hardware business and will cut deeply into Windows' market dominance. In the end, everyone would win--most noteably the consumer (and those who like building their own machines).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm pretty sure the iPhone is the smallest machine running OS X.
Yes, it's kind of kiosk-style, but it is OS X.
The artical doesn't give dimensions or shoe something in the picture for size comparisons, so it may be the smallest but is it the size of a football pitch or the size of an apple?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
work at Psystar
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
Why oh why does everyone insist on using Wikipeda links instead of direct company links?
Is the new /. meme going to be "does it run OS X?"
--Ted
Limina.Log
Is cramming MacOS onto a wholly unsuitable machine the new version of doing the same thing with Linux?
I want a dock on my watch and my microwave to make that *DNNGGG!* noise when I open the door.
Please point me towards a Dell laptop with motion sensors.
The article links to a fuzzy YouTube video of the device going through what looks like a boot loader, then booting Leopard, then flipping through a variety of Mac applications.One can also hear what I think are the OQO's fans working overtime to keep up.
The video looks credible, but it would be nice if it were recorded with something that could focus in closer.
Hackintoshes apparently are Slashdot-worthy now. Ridiculous.
As with relation to this post, 90% of the work is done with the hacked ISO of Leopard you get off where you want (Google is your friend) by people like Zephyroth. He might have done a little hacking, but I do not care really. This is not ground-breaking. The Psystar article was more ground-breaking because if Psystar exists it is a company trying to market 'clone Macs' without sanction from Apple. I bravely say, anyone (who knows about osx86 and only even has a decent amount of skill of playing with OS's) could achieve what was done in this article.
Please tell me that English is not your first language.
Dell may not have them, but HP does.
please me, have no regrets.
My cheap Toshiba tablet PC has accelerometers for emergency HDD-shutdown.
It's three years old.
Indeed. It's almost laughable the veiled attempt at pseudo-elitism.
It might run Mac OS X, but one thing this OQO is not is a Mac.
No shit. To be a Mac it needs to be made by Apple. And perhaps have a faulty wireless card (yes, I have a MacBook, and that shitty Airport is a recurring problem, "just works" doesn't really extend to wireless).
There is nothing that separates a "Mac" from a PC: the Mac is, for all purposes, an Intel, IBM-compatible PC. Generally the Mac fans say that "OSX makes the Mac", but when they see OSX running on non-Apple PCs then confusion settles and vague sentences appear, like the above, that seem to be based on some mystical characteristic of a "Mac".
What does the binary language of the CPU have to do with the quality of the hardware? Who cares? By "quality hardware", I'm sure that we would mean something more important than that.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Him write fine. Your a grammar-Nazi!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This is hardly anything new, Leopard has been running on the Sony VAIO UX for awhile now. The UX is about the same size, and double the performance of the OQO http://micropctalk.wetpaint.com/page/Installing+Macintosh+OSX+10.5+(Leopard)?t=anon
"but one thing this OQO is not is a Mac."
Forget the weird grammatical structure, what exactly is this supposed to mean? That it runs OS X poorly? That it is not Apple hardware? That it's not authorized? Thanks for the enlightening comment Timothy!
"I just put my dick in your moms mouth, but one thing your mom is not is a condom."
This is the first usage of a non-intel or -AMD x86 CPU to run desktop OS X on non-Apple hardware. There are no known guides to running a VIA C7 variant, so if this guy's not bluffing and provides some info, this helps other ultraportables using the C7 to run OS X. Regardless of the complete un-kosherness of running OS X on non-apple hardware, it has opened the gates for tons of free enthusiastic public user testing.
By "quality hardware", I'm sure that we would mean something more important than that.
Indeed. My Thinkpad had my Macbook Pro beat to hell in the quality of the hardware. It was more solidly built, had a far superior keyboard, and came with a mini dock (port extender) so I could just bring it in to work in the morning and set it down and go straight to work... no fumbling around for cables or having the stupid "magsafe" connector come out without my noticing it when someone drops a pile of books on my desk...
And I didn't have to go cap-in-hand to the genius bar to replace the hard drive or void my warranty. And it didn't overheat to the point that I had to pull the battery pack out to cool it down when I was doing something CPU-intensive.
And to my eyes it even looked better, the way a stealth fighter looks better than an Airstream caravan.
Apple's hardware is pretty, but there's more to quality than expensive clothes and heavy makeup.
Ditto for five year old Thinkpads.
I'm a long time Mac user who recently made the switch - to a Hackintosh. The OS really is central to the Apple proposition. But.. the hardware is also a big part of it - in terms of the reliability that only comes with total control of hardware and software.
Hardware is also important in terms of the user's perception of quality. I'm using the Apple Cinema Display I previously used on my Powermac and it is still far superior to the Samsung panel I bought recently for my kid.
But all that said, I like the fact that my Hackintosh cost me a lot less than the new top of the range iMac (granted, I already owned the Cinema Display), and it still outperforms the real deal.
However, 10.5.3 may be the end of the road for Hackintosh as I'm sure all the recent noise around this and Psystar will have Apple bringing down the hammer and breaking OS X for non-Apple hardware very soon.
G4 Hackintosh
wrong - the cases are unique to Apple.
;)
oh - you meant the guts
But if Apple did a "Certified Program" they'd lose their compatibility and optimization. Right now, since everything is in-house, they can write their software/firmware around the exact specifications of certain pieces of hardware. If they had to broaden that field, they couldn't optimize for specifics. The system would bog down more. And as far as compatibility goes, you'd have to start getting drivers for every other piece of hardware you buy. If it's in-house, that's not a problem.
The only time it becomes a problem is when you have a sales model and market base of "people-who-never-used-computers". I think we can all agree Apple cornered the market by selling their computers as "the easiest to use" or "plug it in and go". The customer base for that type of model doesn't need the complexity. And even though their "Power User" market is growing which makes that model less sustainable, I would imagine that they'll want to hang on to the "ease of use" as long as possible.
Even though Slashdot readers revel in the complexity of computer systems, I'm pretty sure Apple isn't going to change their model for us. I think we all know that for all of us that know a thing or two about computers, there's way more people out there who know jack-diddley about them.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Him right fine.
Fixed that for you. HTH.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I think you might get his grammar if you add a comma:
one thing this OQO is not, is a mac.
Doesn't make it any less dumb of a sentence.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Most interesting to me is the processor - it's not AMD or Intel - it's a Via C7M. Via owns Centaur technology, the Texas based owner of the Cyrix IP, which they acquired from National Semiconductor. They still release chips 2-3 generations behind the leaders at larger form factors, but apparently quality control is much better than Cyrix (at least I haven't read of anything horrible about them).
I didn't even know that chip supported SSE2 or better, but that was ignorance (see wiki)
I don't understand people tagging stuff like this "hard hack". Sure, it's not as trivial as installing XP or even Linux or some flavor of BSD, but let's see. Is there any original development done? Nope... just leveraging existing OSx86 work and other odds and ends around Darwin/x86. You're doing the work of an OEM. All you need to do is find a hardare platform reasonably close to one of the Macs (not hard, it's all Intel based), or pluck and pick some third-party drivers. Yay. Is it a hack? Yes. Hard hack? No... the dude that cracked the iPhone was a "hard hack".
He writes fine. You're a grammar Nazi!
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
1. MSOffice
2. Profit Margins
3. History as Computer Maker
If Apple put MacOS onto other machines, MS would pull support for MSOffice on MacOS in a New York Nanosecond. That would seriously batter Apple computer sales, because many of us (myself included) are forced by our employers to use MSOffice. Yes, OpenOffice is a lovely thing, but our IT dept and management doesn't give a flying fuck about OpenOffice, and never will. It's an MS shop and that's that. They don't care what COMPUTER you use - so I have a MacBookPro - but the software for our daily interactions Must Be MS. (sigh - I know, I know)...
So, That's Reason #1 (with a gun to the head) why Apple won't open up.
2. Apple makes Serious Bank on their high end machines (desktop or laptop) and opening up would blow those margins to the wind because if you're so up on a high end machine, you could probably build something to rival today's fire breathing dragon at a substantially lower cost than what HP and certainly Apple would charge you.
Also, Apple depends on that margin, as it allows them to use that money to seed other projects, some few of which might pan out (iPod, iTMS) and some more that won't do so well (AirTunes, AppleTV) some that seriously Tank (20th Anniversay Mac) and some that leave expensive craters in the ground (Pippin, Newton, The Cube). Without the margins Apple pulls from their high-end gear, none of those ventures would have happened, and while Pippin was a fucking disaster, the iPod is anything but.
So, they're not going to cannibalise their bovine cash dispenser.
3. History as a computer company. They are known first as a computer company, that happens to make totally hip consumer items. This will change over time, as computers slowly fade into the woodwork, but until then, their flagship product is MacOS - it's the one thing that ties all their products together, and it is intimately tied to their vision as a computer company.
So, for all those reason (and I am sure, many more) Apple will not open up their OS. It would be suicide.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Me thank you.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
More like strolling or sauntering, but definitely not running.
The Apple Mac is a known hardware platform.
This adds stability since Apple doesn't have to worry about every $10 video card in existence working on it.
Make it work on generic PC hardware will likely decrease the stability of the OS.
Apple certified systems is interesting, in that they would probably only certify closed systems that are not readily extensible.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Only the Touch and iPhone. All the other iPods run a custom, 100% unreleated OS called Pixo.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Even if they use the same commodity chips, there's still the engineering behind the boards, power supplies, case and so on.
Wouldn't help. Evil never dies.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You're right though, and the cases *are* nice. The design is well-thought and there are some nice details that show a certain amount of attention to little things that in aggregate can make a difference.
Still, hardly enough to position modern Macs as more then Apple PCs; the PowerPC times of yore are over, and I think that deep-down many Apple fans regret that decision, since the Mhz jump has come at the expenses of lack of differentiation.
That's one of the reasons why I view the MacBook fuckup as something even more serious: not only does Apple control the hardware they want to supply, they manage to ship sub-par choices!
There are some nice things about an Apple laptop: the design is nice, some details are nice, etc. But it's not like it's in a league of it's own: when one comes down to it it's a PC with selected components.
I have been trying to duplicate this by dropping books onto my desk next to my MacBook and have yet to do so. Is it a feature unique to the pro? Or did you mean that you dropped the books directly on the adapter?
Okay Apple does make good hardware. If you look at equal quality systems the prices are actually pretty close. And yes there is a difference in quality between X86 computers.
When you get a $600 notebook from BestCityDepoMax they really cut corners on things you may never notice but then you may.
The software I work with everyday records audio. Guess what? On some of the notebooks that customers buy the audio recording is really bad!
Not only is it bad but the recording hardware just works strange. On some the audio will be full of static at some sampling rates but not others or it will only be clear if you use 16 bit samples and not 8 bit!
When dealing with speech the sampling rate shouldn't have any effect on static!
Then you have things like the LCD screen, battery life, the keyboard, and even the case.
It is shocking just how good of a computer you can get for a little money these days. But don't dismiss the value of quality hardware.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
These machines are neat, but holy shit they're expensive! Why is there such a leap in price when you go from a PDA that costs a few hundred bucks to one of these things that costs between $1000 and $2100 (when not on sale)? This is actually one of the most expensive portable Macs. I think I'd rather bolt a keyboard onto an iPod Touch.
As a 22 year Mac user, I think it's pretty cool to see OS X running on a non-Apple box. Am I going to go out and do that? Probably not. Too much effort and know how required of me to do it and maintain it. I just need a box that works out of the box.
Until Apple does license OS X to 3rd parties, I will stick with Apple brand hardware and applaud the techies out there that love tinkering and making this stuff work on non-apple boxes.
Really. We can all live together. It's not that hard.
Pooty tweet
Nope! We love our new Intel Macs! They're faster than our old G5's!
Really, this whole notion that we need to "be different" is blown way out of proportion. Was I stunned when I heard that Apple was switching to Intel? Sure. I never saw that coming!
I was thrilled to think about the speedy new laptops that would be coming out eventually and the possibilities that Intel Macs afforded a Mac user. I'm not a serious gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but being able to poke around in the world of Windows gaming on my Mac makes me very happy.
If I wanted to I could even goof around with Linux as well... all on my Mac.
As long as Final Cut runs faster and I have the stability that I am accustomed to, I really could care less what chip is in there.
Pooty tweet
I don't know whether they dropped the books on the cable, on another cable that tugged on the power cable, or missed the cable altogether. As I said, I didn't notice at the time that it had happened, or I would have plugged it back in. When I returned to my desk my laptop had shut down to save power, and there was nobody else in the office at the time.
I have also had the magsafe connector pull away under trivial tension many times. I have never had any problem with any other power connector on any other laptop, either mine or any of the users I supported at ABB over the past 20 years. Nor have I had a power connector pull a laptop off a desk... video cables, yes, SCSI cables, yes, serial or parallel cables, yes, but those are all screwed in or clamped on. The magsafe connector may be an advance over the funky connector on the Powerbooks and iBooks, but a plain barrel connector is much simpler and more reliable.
Apple's definition of quality seems to be "it looks cool and costs more", not "it works better".
I have nothing against Apple, Apple users, or OSX. If anything I've got some thing that rub me off, and others that attract me. The ratio was enough to influence the wife in buying a Macbook, so I'm not exactly allergic to Apple.
As with all communities there are always some things to like and dislike, and I was pointing at one common Mac behavior: the ofte misplaced elitism. Elitism by itself, in some amounts, it's not bad: heck, most GNU/Linux users are "elitists" in a different way.
But some part of the Mac fan base is in a weird crossroad: they still want to "exclusive" feel,the feeling of a tight, marginalised community, while at the same time cheering the advances of Apple consumer electronics and surrendering to the obvious evidence that Mac computers are for almost all purposes PCs. This is not something easy to swallow, I can understand that, and personally I was a little disappointed with Apple's Intel shift, but that's the way life is.
apple should come out with a mid-range head less desktop and A $1500 laptop with a real video card.
more video cards now days are the ATI or Nvidia ones that use the same core chips with differnt ram and speed configs
Heh.
The company which became IBM was founded in 1888 as the Tabulating Machine Company by Herman Hollerith, in Broome County, New York. It was incorporated as Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR) on June 16, 1911, and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1916. IBM adopted its current name in 1924, when it became a Fortune 500 company.
I had no idea Apple was that old! And here I thought Steve was in his 50's.
Pooty tweet
OSX brought to you in wonderful Vesa 3.0 with SSE3 emulation. Why even bother putting it on a device you cannot get QE or CI on? Leopard NEEDS 3D hardware. Without the pretty, OSX is just BSD with an outdated kernel model ;P
Maybe that's why they picked up a certain chipmaker for $278 million recently? I'm sure they can still compile Leopard (or it's next generation) to PCC and universal binaries are everywhere. Plus PA Semi's chips sound more efficient than anything else they could get their hands on right now, a MacBook (Pro) that ran all day on a charge would be sweet.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
No, I think he meant,
one thing this OQO is not, is a macaroni salad
But midsentance he realized his craving for a macaroni salad was so intense, he had to get one.
Plus if it's that small, I can smack said art student around the head and drop his "Mini Mac" into his "Chocca-Macca-Poser-mericano" also!
Cool!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
You sir, obviously don't own a Labrador Retriever puppy that finds anything smaller than a 2 x 4 completely invisible. The magsafe connector has saved my MBP several times from Trips to the Repair Depot. And yes, I've had "regular" power connectors go sideways and fail, with predictably spectacular results.
OTOH, I agree with much of your complaints about the new Macs. I like em, but they're nothing to get all wound up sideways about.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
As does the Thinkpad on my desk that was purchased in the late 90's/early00s that I'm now using as my on-the-go staging server.
This company generally buys high-end, so I'm sure this was a helluva expensive laptop when they bought it, but still, it's 10 years old and includes the motion sensors.
IIRC, they had some commercials about this feature.. showing a laptop flying off a desk in slo-mo while the narrator talks about how the Hard Disk won't push the platters into the heads because the laptop knows when it's falling.
Personally, I always thought that they'd probably sell more computers if they made the damn thing play a WAV of a person screaming as it fell. I'm sure some people would drop it just for the fun. Surely enough people would fumble the catch that IBM could recoup the costs of including the sound effect!
Make it work on generic PC hardware will likely decrease the stability of the OS.
Only on that cheap, flakey hardware. Windows and Linux don't have issues with stability on quality hardware either.
I was considering buying one of those nifty computers, but it would have to be capable of running FreeBSD — with all/most hardware supported...
Has anyone tried?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They could starting querying the hardware more. Right now, OSX will run on a Pentium 4 chip, despite no Mac ever shipping with a P4 (except some early development loaner machines). It would be pretty trivial to have OSX query the CPU, and if it detects a P4 or some other chip that no Mac has shipped with, not run. And so on and so forth.
Then to take it one step further, they could start using DRM like the TPM chip to ensure the machine is a Mac. This might take some hardware changes, but if they started adding it tomorrow to their computers, at the rate they kill support for old products they could stop supporting the machines that don't have the chip in about 2 years and the Mac crowd would just roll over and take it.
One of the two laptops I owned previous to a Macbook had the power connector break off the motherboard. And this from completely normal use. Never had it pulled off a table or desk. Never dropped it. Just having it plugged in was enough to cause it to snap.
If you don't understand that the friggin CPU architecture is not what makes hardware superior or inferior for the majority of Apple's target audience, you are most likely not part of this majority...
Apple hardware is superior in the sense that it is integrated, quiet and (to a lot of people) good-looking. The user experience of the hardware and software combines is what makes the hardware superior. I'm not going into the 'Apple hardware is overpriced' argument too much anymore, but let me say this: Apple hardware in the US (in $) is actually *much* cheaper than Dell hardware in Europe (in â), does that make Dell overpriced too? Seeing that the there are literally no competing products with the same form factor and level of integration that are actually cheaper, the 'overpriced' argument does not hold for me. Also, there's a difference between 'price' and 'value' that seems to be hard to see for some people. Something can be cheap but worthless (or devaluate really fast), while something expensive may in fact be a bargain...
So what you're actually saying is that Macs are special in the hardware sense in that they are designed and produced differently than the average PC, although their internals are very similar to PC's (Apple does use special CPU steppings and GPU firmware FWIW), and special in the software sense in that they are the only personal computers that can run OS X legally and fully supported.
Can you no please explain how Macs are *not* special from common PC's again?
If you go down to China Town and buy some knockoff Nikes they will not, if fact, be real Nikes. They *may* be higher quality products, they may be better designed. But they will not be Nikes.
This is the Apple argument. People pay exorbitant prices for commodity PCs strapped up with a BSD operating system and some shiny widgets. But they aren't buying that - they're buying an Apple. It's that simple.
Good for them, I'll stick with Ubuntu thanks.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Then to take it one step further, they could start using DRM like the TPM chip to ensure the machine is a Mac.
They already do; every Mac ships with a TPM, and if a check against it fails things like the Finder and the Dock won't run. Hackintoshes just remove the code that checks it.
I write bullshit
Apple is not going to roll out new computers with a completely new processor design now that the Intel transition is nearing completion.
/. you weird bastards are probably going to try and do something seriously weird and dangerous to that dog's innards in order to give it new life.
Apple is very happy with their relationship with Intel and the recent purchase probably has more to do with mobile, server or embedded devices than it does with their computer lines.
Your average Mac gets about 5 years of life and if Apple started cutting into that with DRM... there would be riots. A Mac's lifespan is one of the things we love about our Macs.
Sure, they get a little slower compared to newer machines, but you're not going to shoot that adorable little puppy you bought a few years back just because it got older and a little slower and you see a younger cuter puppy at a pet store are you?
Actually, this is
Pooty tweet
Price and value! A very nice distinction.
Pooty tweet
You sir, obviously don't own a Labrador Retriever puppy that finds anything smaller than a 2 x 4 completely invisible.
You're right. My puppies have all been of the primate kind, though that opposable thumb is hell on computers, and I've pulled all kinds of interesting things out of CD and floppy drives.
Still never had a laptop pulled off a table. I'm not saying it can't happen, but based on my experience and that of the 150-400 developers and salesmen I've supported at various times over the past couple of decades... I really can't see that as a common failure mode unless you're in the habit of leaving power cables hanging in free catenaries about the place.
What means this "i_b_m compatible?"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Yes, Steve Jobs is evil. He eats babies and strangles kittens for fun. He destroys other companies because he enjoys watching the suffering of others.
Steve Jobs didn't destroy those companies. He bought back their OS X licenses so that Apple could survive. Spindler/Amelio almost destroyed Apple with their confusing product matrices, botched OS upgrade plans and a self defeating clone program.
If Jobs didn't do what he did, Apple would still be losing money in the billions and there would be no OS X or iPod or iPhone or Macintosh unless they were gobbled up by Sony or Sun or something like that.
Jobs wasn't out to destroy anything. He just wanted to save the company he founded and bring it back to profitability. And by that standard, he's done an amazing job.
Enough with the "destruction" and "evil Machiavellian plot" rhetoric. They want to make cool stuff and make money doing so. I hardly find that evil or really even manipulative. They're just doing what a business does.
Until they start breaking laws, attain monopoly power and abuse it... tone down the rhetoric. It just doesn't work.
Pooty tweet
He said that they have nice-looking, well-designed cases. If that's all it takes to make a computer "special," then my computer is special from "common" PCs as well. Macs have the same hardware as PCs: the same CPUs, the same RAM, the same hard drives, etc. Yes, they might be better quality than a bargain-basement Dell, but so is my custom-built PC. There's nothing inherently better hardware-wise about a Mac, and the only substantial difference is the OS.
The "AirPort dropping connections" problem is quite easily solved in most cases by making sure the base station you're connecting to uses WPA with the AES encryption option, rather than TKIP, or using WPA2 (where AES is required, and TKIP is not an option).
This drove me nuts when I replaced my G3 iBook with my C2D MacBook with the "N"-capable chipset, until I found the answer. This of course, doesn't happen when you're actually using an Apple AirPort base station, but is a common problem running typical off-brands. In my case, I was running two Linksys WRT54GS's with Alchemy, which I then switched to DD-WRT in an attempt to work around the problem. That in itself didn't solve the problem until I stumbled across the AES issue.
No, that's not what I was actually saying. I was saying that they have some nice details. So does a Sony Vaio.
You're immediate assumption that I was talking about something very special and unique is part of what I was referring to.
You're main point is that it runs OSX legally. That is true: the only difference between an Apple PC and a non-Apple PC is artificial, DRM-like OS lock. This as some nice features - less hardware to support,less drivers, etc - but it's not something "unique" or "new", it's merely a restriction with a purpose.
Thanks for the tip, much appreciated. Alas, I think my problem is slightly different: while it can be related eventually with some setting in the router I'm already using WPA2... the connection doesn't exactly drop: a ping to the wireless router will have ttl values of 200-1400ms (my ThinkPad with GNU/Linux displays a consistent 1.5ms). This makes everything slow as molasses.
I've searched around - being a Linux user I'm used to it - and until now most advices didn't work out (limit the speed of the router; change from 802.1g to 802.1n; other assorted recipes).
I'll thinker a bit with your advice though, since I'm allowing both WPA and WPA2 maybe the Mac tells me it is using WPA2 but secretly switches to WPA.
Still,bloody hell. I think that Macbook was a good buy, but this Airport problem is just something unforgivable really.
I replaced the motherboards in over 30 dell notebooks because of bad connectors giving problems (usually the center pin would get loose or the pcb around the jack would crack and wreck a trace) about 10 or 12 were Latitude D600s. I only worked as the dell warranty guy for 14 months.
I have to say I haven't heard of any problem quite like the one you're experiencing, and I'm an independent consultant that deals primarily with Macintosh systems. My personal MacBook is now over a year old, and the only thing I've seen is the mysterious dropping connection. I also have an iMac of the same vintage whose AirPort has been rock solid, and none of my clients have ever reported similar issues to yours.
That said, sometimes Apple releases some stinkers. My G3 iBook was repaired by Apple at least four times. The first time, the onboard memory failed five weeks after I got the unit. It took three attempts by Apple's repair people to fix the issue, because the first two times, they "repaired" the wrong thing. I was absolutely livid, and they managed to replace my perfectly functioning HDD with all my data on it (fortunately, it was a new machine, so it didn't really have *that* much on it, but still...I'll never send in another for repair without a backup). The fourth time was for the well-known video chip issue. My seemed to last longer than most others', but still eventually failed. It may have even gone back for repair one more time just before the extended warranty ran out, but it's been stable since then, though I don't use it very much anymore.
Thanks for the comment; my problem seems to be indeed rarer then the dropped connection one, but not unique: the search term that brings up the occurrences is "Macbook Airport ttl=".
As for the stinkers, they can be excused if the support if top notch. I think that Apple had a very strong area in this (maybe they still do, don't know): even if the hardware had problems their user support was good compared to retail, which further served to mark a divide between faceless PC retailers that have little reason not to screw those who bought a Packard-Bell in prmotion last week and Apple, that cared for the costumers.
Well, Dell bought Alienware, which does have those motion sensors. So, yes, they have those.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Preach it!
I recently switched to the Mac both at the office and at home, but the sole reason I did was that the Mac isn't some annoying separate hardware platform anymore. I can boot Windows and virtual machines are easy.
If/when I make a Hackintosh (which looks like fun), will it be a Mac?
Sorta.
It's just a matter of semantics. If I were running a Hackintosh and someone who was giving me a file said "you're on a Mac, right?" then I'd say "yes," of course.
But if someone said "what kind of Mac do you have?", I'd have to say something like, "welll, actually it's just a regular old PC running OSX."
Since the Mac has traditionally been assumed to be a hardware and software platform, it just gets tricky.
But there is absolutely zero reason to be snobby about it, and I think you're right that that is a lot of what's going on.
This is from my recent order confirmation for a Latitude D830: 120GB Free Fall Sensor Hard Drive 9.5MM, 7200RPM,Latitude
You can check the availability of these drives on Dell's site.
Like the RIAA's going to bring down the hammer and stop all of those illegal copiers very soon?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I got Dell removed from the approved vendor list at my last-but-one job 10 years ago, and they hadn't gotten re-approved when I left there in 2005, so that's a pretty weak counterexample. :)
Come to think of it, if a vendor shipped us Wintel notebooks similar to the Macbook Pro I doubt they'd make it into the list in the first place. Apple's oddball hardware really does hurt it in the corporate market. Big companies have their own support staff and policies... for example, at one point (due to an audit further upstream) I couldn't get warranty replacement hard drives because we had a retention policy for hard drives that precluded sending the old ones back.
True, but for desktops, I do not see them abandoning Intel so soon after the transition.
Pooty tweet
I'm sorry, does 2003 not qualify as "early 00s" ?
Now take a step back and try reading that as a non-techy.
I'll help: it doesn't matter what hardware is in it, Apple makes PC's that are special in the sense that they are well-integrated boxes that run an alternative OS. Simple as that, period...
Why is it so hard for Slashdot people to understand the hardware is just the medium the computer runs on, it's the software and experience that sets them apart. As of yet, no other vendor can offer the same *computer systems* that Apple offers, so that *does* make them 'special' compared to 'normal PCs'
The DRM argument doesn't impress me, both my Macs also run Windows and Linux. I've never run into any DRM issues on OS X, and as I'm using my computer like an end-user does most of the time, not as a free-software fundamentalist, I don't really mind running proprietary software if it's good.
Apple also has stricter quality control than the average PC maker. Dell was willing to use cheap ECS motherboards back when they had a hideous failure rate but were the cheapest part available. Apple would not put up with that in a vendor.
Not that any one vendor is perfect - I heard great things about IBM Deskstar drives before the catastrophic failure rate gave them the nickname Deathstar. In fact, I got mine replaced 3 times under warranty (and backed it up religiously, something I'm not generally good at). Finally after Hitachi took over the business I got a reliable drive that has not failed (in almost 5 years - the purchase was in 2002, the last failure in June 2003, or at least that's when I formatted it).
. I've never run into any DRM issues on OS X
I was referring to the way OSX itself is locked to Apple PCs, when there is no technical reason for it (only business reasons of not wanting OSX to run on other combinations of hardware). This is similar to DRM in that something prevents usage even though there is no real reason for being so.
ot as a free-software fundamentalist, I don't really mind running proprietary software if it's good.
Of course, that was clear from the beginning, never assumed otherwise, since you're using OSX. There is little or nothing that would led me to believe that you were part of the free software community, at least no more or less than if you used Windows.
So that's a "yes" to my question? Good. Glad you could concede that point.
Here's another estimate: I estimate that you're a pedantic douche-bag.
And I'm willing to bet I'm at least 75% correct on that one.
Lost what game?
Pointing out (rather correctly) that you're a douchebag? All I have to do is click on my name to get to your comment. It's so easy I can't NOT do it.
You've actually bookmarked this thread (or you navigate to it manually?) just so you can argue... what, exactly?
I do have fun when your type sticks their head up. Makes a pretty easy target. So I do very much encourage you to keep it up.
Tell me this: where is the contradiction?
I said "eary 00s." So, clearly, right up front, I put it out there that it's possibly as new as 2003 (2004 would have to be considered mid-00's, IMO).
The problem is you've taken an obvious hyperbole as a literal. A figure of speech as regular is metaphor, simile, sarcasm, etc.
So maybe it's some sort of learning disorder? Like aspergers for reading comprehension -- you never learned how to use context clues?
I do hope you come back for more. This is very enjoyable.
But do tell me more about how I "lost the game."