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Apple Prevents G3 Owners From Upgrading to G4
sammy baby writes "Wired News is reporting that Apple deliberately wrote the firmware in the Apple G3 computers to prevent owners from upgrading them using the G4 CPU. Damn shame - I would have considered buying a G4, but I don't want to give my money to a company that resorts to tactics like this."
Robert Morgan of RFI has seen Firmware 1.1 machines running with G4 chips. They were running Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X Client. These two OSes contain code to allow a machine to use a G4. The firmware was implemented to make sure that no non-OS 9/X G3 uses a G4 chip, because the machine will die... in a big way. The G4 does things really differently to the G3, and OS 8 of any version just cannot handle it. So it's not a block. It's a bug fix. Get a copy of Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X Client, and you'll be sweet. all the best, base2_celtic (pipeline 256)
Using the holy grail of OSes...
http://discuss.info.apple.com/boards/powermac.nsf/ ccb088a1de6aac738525631c0067846b/79720ab 376a518ed862567e00068b29d?OpenDocument
s f/by+Topic?OpenView
is a thread on an Apple message board, where supposedly Apple will post the info about whether they'll fix the ROM.
http://discuss.info.apple.com/boards/powermac.n
That's a more general link to the PowerMac forum, where lots of people are complaining
http://www.maccentral.com/forum/
Is a forum on MacCentral.com, where I have put up lots of comments about this problem, and other users have also been talking about it.
http://www.macintouch.com/bg3upgrade.html
Is a link to a Macintouch area where user e-mails are posted.
What it comes down to is that Blue G3 owners(like me) are extremely mad. We have been hearing daily about the amazing things some developers are going to be doing w/ the G4 and AltiVec and we want in.
Apple got a lot of the early buyers(like me) to install a ROM update that was advertised as improving PCI performance(and probably did) that disabled G4 support. Apple did not tell us this and still has not admitted it.
Many Blue G3 owners have already said they will never buy a Mac again, others are looking at legal alternatives(class action suit because Apple removed a feature that was in our machines when we bought them w/o our knowledge).
Basically, Apple is in deep shit. If they don't know it by now, they've gotta be brain dead.
Apple had better put out an explanation and a fix real fast.
It'd help a lot of those both on /. and those that post to /. would research what they are talking about.
/. to proliferate half-truths.
The G3s are upgradeable. If Apple or a 3rd party company wishes to offer G4 upgrade cards they can, just a little more work. In fact, there is one company that already has working cards (can't remember the name right now). I'm not saying that the firmware decision was a good one, but they never said you could upgrade a G3 to a G4 in the first place. This "story" was out months ago in a number of places. Too bad it took wired.com and
Cameroon
I don't know about you, but for the most part I find that upgrades are not cost-effective - you won't spend much more if you buy a whole new machine and sell your old one.
I think Mac users got into the habit of doing upgrades during Apple's darkest days, when they were just not responsive to consumer demand. Based on the reaction of people to the new G4, I don't think we can accuse them of that now.
I'm not inclined to think of Apple's action as a good thing - I think it's a mildly bad one. But I'm not sure it warrants the extreme negative reaction it's received so far.
D
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The video editing card for my beige G3 is a third-party card. The only thing closed about the hardware is that Apple's the only company that can make it.
Open hardware tends to drive down prices very fast, but it doesn't seem to lead to innovation. I think this is because consumer demand is not for innovation, but lower prices above all.
You know, it's interesting that the most intriguing hardware comes from closed or partially closed systems. We hear more "cools" and "awesome" when we talk about vendors of closed systems like Apple or SGI. When's the last time we featured an article like "HP comes out with new Pavilion line of PCs"?
Granted, we may not be able to afford some of these "cool" systems. But I have yet to see proof that openness can create something "insanely great" like the Mac or BeOS. And - before you ask - I consider Linux "great". But not insanely so, because it's just an excellent copy of something that already existed. MacOS and BeOS both broke new ground in some way - Mac with the GUI and BeOS with the pervasive multi-threading.
D
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- Ok, for starters, I am here to defend Apple. If you don't like that, go somewhere else. I've seen a lot of people complaining about Apple starting to use business tactics that they don't like. Well, let's see here. When was the last time you saw a 486 motherboard that was upgradeable to a pentium? Or even a pentium motherboard that was upgradeable to a pentium 2? On top of this, Apple has never ever said their G3 systems would be upgradeable to G4. For that matter, they never said any of their prior systems would be upgradeable to G3, but lots of third party companies made those upgrades, and believe me, there are companies that are making G4 upgrades, even for those G3 users who installed the ROM which purportedly makes them unupgradeable. No one really knows this for sure, as no one has tried AFAIK. All this hype is about mere rumor, and every last one of you fell into the media pitfall.
- Now, for those of you still spouting the rhetoric about apple's prices, I'd like to remind you that the new G4, classified as a supercomputer by the government, thus a weapon (and as of yet, unexportable to other countries), is available for a starting price of 1599. If anyone out there tells me that is too much money to pay for a computer with a top of the line processor, Modem, Ethernet, Firewire, USB, 128-bit video card, and more, plus the wonderful support of Apple (rated very highly every year) and the ease of use and increase in productivity it brings, well, then they really don't know a good deal when they see one.
- Those of you complaining about the death of clones: The clone idea was initially to help spread the Mac platform. It didn't. All it did was cut into Apple's own user base far deeper than they could have handled. If Apple didn't kill the clones, the clones would have killed Apple, and we wouldn't be having this debate.
- For anyone complaining about the OS: Install LinuxPPC. Or, realize that the OS is getting better with every revision, and the OS X is going to put Microsoft, and particularly NT, to shame.
Myself, I'm looking forward to purchasing a new G4, and selling my old Beige G3, as soon as I have the disposible income to do so. The price is right, the hardware offering more than tempting, and the OS better than ever."Is this not a rare fellow, my lord? He's as good at any thing, and yet a fool." -from "As You Like It", Act 5,
What apple did was release a firmware patch which makes the computer check to see if its using a G3 cpu before allowing startup (it's not a patch to the normal ROM - if it had been, any idiot would have been able to reverse the patch, as the MacOS ROM is a file on the disk on recent Macs).
It was known before this batch of G3s even shipped that they'd be G4 upgradeable, but apple released a software patch which seems to prevent g4 upgrades. OH NO!! Not a software patch! The treachery! They'll never get around THAT! Apple knows the futility of this.
Apple has not (in recent history) even marketed CPU upgrades for their computers. They've always been third party. XLR8 was quoted on MacInTouch on September 1: "A special fix will be needed to run G4 with the 1.1 firmware in a Blue and White. Users get 5 tones, like the emergency weather warning. We have a fix in hand, using DayStar magic." XLR8's press release on August 31 (the SAME DAY apple announced G4 products) says: "Additional AltiVec(TM) performance software with blue & white compatibility is being readied in our labs now." -Gary Dailey, Director of Marketing for XLR8.Lets look at what Apple actually has done for their customers, upgrade-wise. The long lived family of PCI powermacs, the [789][356]00 series, all have processor daughterboards, which are replaceable, all the way up to G3 or even potentially G4 CPUs. Earlier powermacs can be upgraded to G3s with "L2-cache" upgrades (a CPU on a card fits in where the L2 cache normally goes, and overrides the existing CPU). Apple's G3 desktops all have zif sockets for easy and cheap upgradability. Apple's entire line of desktops uses one type of socket. I think that's pretty good. How many different sockets do you get across the pentium/ppro/p2/p3/celeron/k6/k7-athlon? How many such cpus can be used as an upgrade for one of the other cpus?
I own one of the first PowerMac G3/400s (Blue & White). I remain quite confident that by the time I want to upgrade it, G4 upgrades from third party companies like XLR8, newertech, and powerlogix will be waiting for me.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
Sure, all of us who just read this on /. are probably pretty anoyed with Apple. But this makes no difference to them whatsoever because we're not the market that they cater to. Apple's main demographic are those who buy them because of their ease of use. Just look at the iMac for instance: it's a piece of crap, yet at the same time Apple's made millions off of them because people buy them because "they're pretty" and not because they're good computers. Those Apple customers who are planning on buying a G4 (most of which won't know about the G4 until it hits the market or something like "Mac World") won't know nor care whther or not they can upgrade. They see a newer machine from Apple and decide they want it (of course it must look pretty). I really don't think this will make much difference.
This is one of those times I'm ashamed to be a Mac defender. Simply put, Apple has gone too far. This is a dirty trick, and Apple knows it.
Still, there's hope. Several possible scenarios exist:
1) This really is a dirty trick by Apple. I hope this isn't the case, but it sure looks that way at the moment.
2) This is some sort of bug, which Apple is for some stupid reason not fixing (this is how I would approach Apple with the subject if you write them about it; don't be accusatory or you'll just piss them off).
3) It's well-known that Apple asked Motorola to hold off on releasing the G4 until Apple had a system to put it in. Perhaps this was insurance against that policy, and once Apple has a ready supply of G4-based machines they'll undo the lock.
Anyway, all is not lost; one company (XLR8, if I'm not mistaken) has already found a way around the bug, and may well be sharing it with the other upgrade companies.
I certainly won't be buying a new G4 box. My Beige G3 is still upgradable to the G4, and I have no intention of letting that go. Hopefully by that time Apple will have seen the error of its ways.
One other thought I had: something isn't right about this. Consider that Apple has been lowering its prices, opening parts of its system (and even its QuickTime Streaming Server), and all sorts of other trends towards a more open company. This would seem counterproductive. I never said Steve Jobs wasn't a jerk, but he isn't stupid either, and this doesn't seem to make much in the way of sense. I think he's up to something.
Oh, and one other thing: what exactly is the nature of this lock? I've heard that it's in the Mac OS ROM file; if this is the case, then perhaps it is still possible to upgrade a Linux-only G4 box (anyone tried it?) If it's in OpenFirmware (the only other place it could be on the machine, since it has no hardware-based ROM that can be flashed), then it must be in the form of an OF patch, which means that getting the source to the lock ispossible.
Do you think Intel is going to make it possible to upgrade your Pentium XVI to a Merced or a McKinley? Unless Apple specifically said that the computer would be upgradable to a G4, they have done nothing wrong. Sure, it sucks for the G3 owners. But Apples' upgradability isn't one of the more touted features. It has been known for a while by those "in the know" that the B&W G3s were not upgradable to G4. If anybody wanted a G4 that bad, they would have waited. I don't think anybody said "let me buy this G3 so that I can upgrade to a G4 later."
I'm not trying to say Apple can do no wrong, I'm saying that all the hypocrites out there need to go take a jump. The recurring theme I see on any Apple story posted to Slashdot is this inbred hatred of anything Apple does, with those who hate Apple saying "One more reason not to buy Apple's crap" or, my personal favorite, "When will Apple die?"
Y'all just can't cope with the fact that the system you were sure would die and were taught to hate from such a young age is now simply better. That's right, it's BETTER, and you can't deal with that fact. Say whatever you want about the OS; I've had my PowerBook for over a month and it hasn't crashed yet. But in the hardware arena, you simply can't beat Apple. Maybe you gamers who need voodoo whatever graphics cards will poo-poo that, but for serious work, the design of the system as a whole is much better than, say, Dell. And while I'm not a fan of the new plastics for the G3s, They look infinitely better than the disgusting Dell boxes.
Face it; Apple is here to stay. They may not make the right choices sometimes (see floppy drive, iMac mouse, etc.) but they're not going anywhere.
rooooar