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Realtek's Wireless Driver Drives Thoughts of an Apple Netbook
Slatterz writes "With Macworld 2009 mere weeks away, one rumour that seemingly won't die is the idea of a Mac OS X Netbook PC. Asking a company to provide OS X drivers for their netbooks has, up until now, been met with silence, and probably a little quaking on the vendor side as they wait for the heavy footsteps of Apple's army of lawyers. It seems, however, that Realtek, who provide the WiFi chip found in the MSI Wind U100, are dipping their toes into the legally iffy world of the Hackintosh. Forum users at MSIWind.Net asked politely for drivers, and after a lot of patience,
Beta drivers were provided."
Really, this is a non-story. RealTek makes GPL drivers for *nix, so I'm sure at some point it wasn't going to be really hard to make a driver for Darwin.
I'm also certain that RealTek makes chips that can be used in USB dongles (RaLink certainly does) so therefore it's a cheap way to provide connectivity to an older Mac which has USB but no wireless (I'm sure there are a few models still in production; I'm not a mac head).
If they integrated into Apple's Airport utility, they would probably be violating some agreement with Apple.
By providing drivers to a separate bluetooth device, it provides a workaround that hopefully keeps Apple away.
The story is bunk. Its making a lot of assumptions due to lack of knowledge on just why a Hackintosh is illegal, and how this is not.
Nothing prevents ANY company from making drivers that will run in OS X. The ONLY prevention is from someone putting OS X on a non-apple machine due to the licensing agreement.
So Dell, HP, MSI any of them can make drivers for their machines that work in OS X, they just cant put OS X ON their machines nor inform you how to do it.
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The driver is not specifically for the wind. That's the same chip used in cheap USB wireless adapters like this one and RealTek has been providing their OS X driver for some time. The driver and associated utility do not work very well, FWIW, and I don't suggest trying to use them with a Mac unless you really have no other option.
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Actually the MacBook doesn't have an expansion slot - that's what caused the big hoo-ha about the lack of Firewire support, there's no way to add it in later.
For the other Macs you're absolutely right - especially if they had a wireless N driver as I could conceive of some Mac users upgrading toa third party card to provide wireless N functionality.
I think the bigger thing that component manufacturers are worried about is that Steve Jobs will call up MSI and say "Hey, we'd like to contract with you to develop a Mac netbook based on the Wind to run OS X. Oh, and by the way... don't use any RealTek chips in it."
I am not a lawyer but that sounds like tortious endangerment of interstate commerce to me.
Quite right, you're not. If you're Apple and you approach a manufacturer, nothing prevents you from stating that you don't want to have a particular supplier's products in your custom built product. Now if Apple were to tell MSI that to do business with Apple, they would have to completely drop RealTek as a supplier from all of MSI's products then you might have a point.
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Realtek has been awesome at providing Mac drivers for years. xlr8yourmac.com has talked about this extensively. A lot of third party pci ethernet cardsbased on realtek chips were made to work via realtek drivers in the past. This goes back to before 2000 when OS 9 was the current Mac operating system. http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&num=10&btnG=Google%2BSearch&as_epq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=www.xlr8yourmac.com&safe=off&as_oq=realtek
Macs _do_ have wireless N cards.
They just call them airport cards and don't make a big deal about it.