Slashdot Mirror


OS X Update Officially Kills Intel Atom Support

bonch writes "After apparently disabling and then re-enabling support for the Atom chipset in test builds of their 10.6.2 update, Apple has officially disabled support for the chipset in the final update. This makes it impossible for OSX86 users to run 10.6.2 on their Atom-based netbooks until a modified kernel shows up."

2 of 610 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No biggie by Smurf · · Score: 5, Informative

    They should explicitly state their product's system requirements and let the consumer decide (like everyone else).

    From the Snow Leopard Tech Specs:

    General requirements
    Mac computer with an Intel processor

    Only Apple makes Macs and Apple does not make any product with the Atom processor. Therefore, no computer with the Atom is supported. Neither is any computer with an AMD procesor. Or any computer not made by Apple, since all Mac clones are over ten years old and used PowerPCs.

    None of those computers are supported. The fact that it works on some of them is a happy coincidence. There it is, written clearly in the very first requirement.

  2. Re: Any other company? by King_TJ · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, I doubt that.... The computer industry has a LONG reputation of building OS's that only run with specific hardware configurations sold by the OS vendor. Until the idea of a "PC clone" came along, this was pretty much how ALL personal computers were sold. (You weren't going to get your Commodore 64 to run anything written for the Atari 800, and your TI99/4A didn't work with any of those, OR a computer from Radio Shack....) SPARC machines ran their own operating systems too. (I think Intergraph had to sell a special port of Windows NT for them, to get them to run that.)

    Certainly, the minicomputers and mainframes out there all ran their own proprietary OS's too.