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Realtek's Wireless Driver Drives Thoughts of an Apple Netbook

Posted by timothy on from the can't-get-there-from-here-in-cupertino dept.

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."

5 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing in the EULA by actionbastard · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is nothing in the Apple EULA that prevents anyone from creating a driver for their hardware to work with OS X. The fact that RealTek does not make -or may never make- hardware for Macs is immaterial.

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    1. Re:Nothing in the EULA by nacturation · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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."

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    2. Re:Nothing in the EULA by uglyduckling · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sorry, are you really claiming here that Apple left the firewire port out for the sake of aesthetics and/or to protect us from the tyranny of a four-pin port?! It was left out as a profit-maximising measure because they know that the MacBook is incredibly popular with musicians and they want to force people who rely on FireWire (i.e. anyone who wants to get multi-channel audio into a laptop at a decent sample/bitrate) into buying the MacBook Pro. Simple as that.

  2. darwin by leuk_he · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Doesn't OSX run on Darwin, An open source bsd based OS? Why would you not be allowed to create drivers for darwin?

  3. PCI Cards et al. by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While this effort might be targeted at the MSI Wind, the work performed should allow any device that use the chipset to work with MacOS X. Think of PCI cards for MacPros, or USB sticks allowing older Macs to get 802.11N support.

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