But it should be - the "bum in the street" is an extreme example, but I know many Americans (several of them close family members and friends) who are worse off than me for healthcare - they are all better off financially than me (I am a late-20s graduate in long term academia) and yet my healthcare is much better than theirs.
You say "lol" as if to mock Cuba's healthcare system, yet according to the WHO, they are ranked 39, just 2 places behind the USA - not bad for a small country under the effects of an embargo with it's extremely wealthy nearby superpower.
Why? Have you been there and experienced it for yourself?
How about ordinary Americans who cannot afford health insurance, or who can just about afford the premiums, but have to fight tooth and nail for coverage of basic things, or end up so enormously in debt that they are financially crippled because they got sick?
How's that preventative care working out for you guys? Like my friend who has been told by her doctor that she needs to take X number of glucose blood tests per day, but her insurance is telling her (ie, making a medical decision) that she only needs to do X-4 tests, and thus will only pay for that many, and that she either has to do what they say, or follow her doctor's advice and pay out of pocket for the extra supplies.
That's merely one anecdote, but it shows that while the technical "quality of care" in the US is high (it does have some of the best equipment and staff in the world), the access to that care is extremely limited for a vast, vast number of your population. IE, if you are very wealthy, or you are lucky enough to have a job that provides outstanding coverage (and are thus tied to your job), you face major barriers to entry to the US system.
Read my post to the other AC who pointed this out - the OP's point was clearly about the US system (Canadians aren't needlessly jingoistic about their healthcare system and don;t refer to it as "the number one healthcare system in the world" - ie, a Glen Beck Faux News slogan).
My point was addressing that, and the wider point about private insurance companies being a nasty cancer in any country that they operate in, not just in the US.
So, to be clear we are talking about PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES making TREATMENT DECISIONS and denying care, exactly like they do in the US - private healthcare being all about profits is not exclusive to the US you know.
I know it did - I'm not oblivious to the fact that Quebec is in Canada, however, the OP was talking about the US system.
The issue does revolve around private insurance companies though, which are a nasty, ugly part of a healthcare system regardless of the country they operate in - we have them here in the UK too and I refuse to touch them given all the horror stories I have heard about them (from UK citizens who have used them in the UK, not even including the heartbreaking stories from my US family and friends).
Ahaahahahahahahahahaha. Oh wait, you were serious, let me laugh even harder.
Private healthcare is a very, very, very distant runner up to a properly managed universal system. Just ask someone in France or Sweden or Cuba (or gasp, even in the UK if they'd actually fix it properly) if they'd trade for the private system as it exists in the US.
There's a reason the US is ranked 67th on the list.
"Greatest healthcare in the free world, if you ignore the 66 other countries above us!"
You could just send the iPod to Apple and they'll send you another one with a fresh battery in it. This costs money of course, but then, you do need to buy a new battery.
If you want a device with a removable battery, then the iPod is not for you. Not sure how Apple are "fucking over their customers" by selling a product that has a non-removable battery - you know before you buy it that this is the case.
It's one of those cumulative cases though, I would assume (whether they are being excessively pernickety or not), that while working on 1 computer coved in tar residue is not so bad, working on 500 might be. Just like visiting a smoke-filled bar just once might not be, but working there every day is...
I'm sure that, especially in more recent times, the service people at Apple don't have to service more than 1 tar-covered machine per day, but heading this off at the pass is just Apple's way of protecting their employees - it should be stated in the warranty though, or I'm not certain that they can enforce it.
Pay for someone else (on their own dime) who will service it instead or something if they don;t want their own employees to have to handle it.
And the Mac version of the card is different to the PC version, so they make fewer of them, thus they cost more.
Should just be an easy case of flashing a different firmware onto the card, but it affects the price.
Also, consider that almost any upgrade component from a hardware vendor will cost more than a separate self-purchased upgrade - RAM, HD, GPU, processors, etc.
Well, just going to Dell and speccing an XPS as close as I could get to the Base Mac Pro (quad core, no monitor, 4Gb ram, similar GPU [less memory on the Mac], same basic networking) the price is over $2000 before I've finished looking at things like the 4 internal, independent SATA bays on the Mac compared to the two on the Dell, the FW800 ports compared to FW400,
Or are you talking whitebox, which I addressed in my original point: don;t forget to add all of the cost of your time to build and set it up, including software, and the warranty (which is 2 years as standard on the Dell compared to 1 year for the Mac unless you extend your Applecare, but is in home for the Dell, or RTB for Mac).
A gt120 is good enough for the bulk of the tasks that will be thrown at it in the market the Mac Pro is aimed at, and if it isn't, you can upgrade it to whatever you fancy. It's not a gaming rig after all. If you are doing fancy graphical stuff with it, you tend to have specialised cards (I have a fair few from Decklink in the MPs we run). You could argue that the $2500 (or £ as I pay) "should" ensure you get a better GPU, but it's not only the graphics card you are paying for, it's everything else around it.
Remember, hobbyist, home-gamer is not the target market for a Mac Pro - thus, a cutting edge GPU with a picture of an elf rendered on the overly elaborate heatsink isn't really top of the list of priorities.
...but I make up for that with a cheap, tacky case, and other inferior or totally missing equivalent hardware if I'm really $1000 less than equivalent machines.
Don't forget to factor in your own time cost, and the cost of any warranty if you bought me whitebox and built it yourself! Also the cost of a retail copy of OS X!
The main difference here is that Obama isn't going to go to war, using this false information as backup, in the face of people clearly telling him it's wrong.
Bush stood up on that little plinth and demonstrably lied to the population, Obama didn't read these numbers off an autocue, claiming them to be the truth. If they're wrong, they'll fix it.
Well, that is if you agree with Stallman, and what you're saying is that holding Apple to Stallman's ethics because it "represents a legitimate and influential school of thought" is equivalent to me being held to a Christian's ethics because they have decided that doing something with your body is "morally wrong" (wanking, sex before marriage, abortion) and they also "represent a legitimate and influential school of thought".
It's not quite so cut and dried I don't think.
Apple here haven't actually "officially" done anything (nor have they "dropped support" for anything since they didn't support it in the first place), and they are not going around forcing people with hackintoshes to nuke and pave their HD. It's just that the latest version of 10.6 doesn't boot on Atom CPUs, whether deliberately or just through coincidence - there were no guarantees that it would work either way.
In that you should be able to do anything you like with the things you have bought, software or otherwise, I agree (within the law of course - if you use your software to defraud a bank or something then no, but you see what I mean). If you have a retail copy of OS X you should be able to do what you like with it, but similarly, Apple is free to do whatever it likes with its own code, including putting in or taking out code that doesn't pertain to its own interests.
I'm not sure you can make the argument that Apple should be morally obliged to ensure that OS X continues to run on Atom CPUs just because it did before - if this was a genuine case of some code being changed that was necessary for something else and Atom support just happened to be a casualty (rather than explictly disabling Atom support - we don;t know either way) then are they obliged to explain what happened (to a product and customer base they do not support) or fix it so that it continues to work?
I'm not seeing anyone sued over hackintoshes, apart from Psystar who are attempting to sell them - the personal user who buys a copy of OS X and a netbook is not being chased down here, but nor does he have any guarantees that Apple won;t change something so it won't work any more if they update. 10.6.1 will continue to run for them.
You mean the bad summary and the erroneous title. Apple didn't "officially" do anything, let along "drop" support for a chip it never supported in the first place.
Either way, that has nothing to do with the relative open-ness of the respective OS sources.
If you say "I think we should kill him!" in response to "what should we do with this guy!" from an angry mob of people who accuse someone of some serious crime (whether guilty or not, you have no proof) and they do , in fact kill him, then you can't use "free speech" as a defence if there's a reasonable chance that you are putting someone in jeopardy.
Similarly if you shout "bomb!" in a crowded room and people get trampled to death trying to escape when you knew it was a hoax.
Libel and slander are specific cases of veracity of the facts, or spreading information you know to be true but that is damaging anyway.
No, pretty sure where flamebait means exactly that. Your post is hardly a calm and measured discussion on the merits on the potential downsides to OS X versus Windows and the diligence or lack thereof of Apple in regard to the OSS code that it ships.
Pretty sure you were merely spoiling for a fight rather than actually attempting to discuss it.
I'm sure you do, but your assertion that "OS X is even more locked down than Windows" is a little bit a stretch, surely. How much of the Windows source is open? How much of OS X? Clearly both are closed OSes, but the core of OS X is a lot more open than Windows.
On the second point, some citations would be nice. Apple is moaned at a lot for their contributions to the OSS community and their "theft" from it (funny, I thought it was free) especially in cases like Webkit/KHTML and Darwin itself.
So, what currently unaddressed security hole exists in the open source stuff Apple ships? Are you claiming that Apple doesn't update the OSS stuff it ships in security updates? Are you claiming they specifically ignore security holes?
What's to stop you from rolling your own implementations of these vulnerable services on OS X if they are open source and you need to run them but are concerned that the shipped Apple version is insecure, assuming that the current OSS version has also been patched, or are you claiming that because Apple doesn't push a patch down on OS X the very same day a patch to the OSS stuff is done by a third party because they may need to test it on their internal OS X builds first that they are "abysmal at keeping up to date".
Perhaps they are going to phase out OS X support on non-SSE4 CPUs, which is not reasonable for them right now since they have near-current products in this category, but as in the case of PPC support being dropped, it may well happen.
Whether they start doing this now on per-processor basis and it affects Atom or do it later when they are ready to drop support for Core Solo (or whatever the last CPU they shipped with no SSE4) makes no difference to them because they never supported Atom in the first place and nipping the Atom issue in the bud now may just be extra gravy.
Please note that calling people stupid as the primary crux of your argument generally isn't helpful. Try to be civil.
What about blaming people who bought (or "obtained") OS X and ran it on a chipset that nowhere on earth has Apple ever said is supported?
When it stops working, perhaps they share perhaps a tiny bit of the blame...?
If you use a product in a way it was never designed for (successfully, legally, illegally, imaginatively, any-which-way-but-lose) and it later stops working (for any reason, expected or unexpected) then you are back to the situation you had when you started out: "This may work, but there are no guarantees, and it may not work in the future if things change".
Not necessarily, although a combination of funny and insightful would probably be appropriate.
Not all people who buy Apple products are out to fluff their ego, just like not all people who buy Dells are too dumb to assemble their own from whitebox parts, or all people who run Linux are too cheap to spend money on an OS.
Huge generalisations really help no one. Regardless of your personal opinion on the "Apple experience", there really is something to it for some people - I personally love having a machine (white intel iMac) that I can carry in a box with a handle over to my friend's house for a quick game night, that runs OS X and XP, takes 5 minutes to pack and unpack, doesn't have to worry about antivirus and malware issues (but is still security conscious enough to understand that we're not and never likely to be 'immune' to security threats), and don;t consider myself better than anyone else because I use a Mac.
The computer I own ticks all the right boxes for what I want to use it for - it's a tool (albeit a very nice looking tool - also a consideration, but not the only one). I'm sure there are PCs out there that are all-in-one and come in a box that has a handle on it that make it easy to transport it like a suitcase, protected by the original packing it came in from the factory, but can that one run OS X out of the box with no need to modify it?
It's not like I went into the store and said "I want to buy a computer that shows how much better I am than everyone else" - I bought the one that fitted my needs best, and was prepared to pay the money for it. The cost of an all-in-one is more than worth it for the convenience of moving it, and the way it looks, and the fact I can run both OS X and XP as needed (calm down, I have Ubuntu on a Powerbook) really does make it an ideal single main machine.
They make a product that you are using. They are in no way morally obligated to provide it to you in a way *you* want.
There is no ethics issue with them explicitly disabling functionality in their product for something they do not sell just because you found out that you could get it to work with non-standard hardware.
If you buy a socket set and discover that while it's calibrated in metric and sold as a metric socket set to work with metric bolts, that it can still just about undo imperial bolts then great - you don't need a second imperial set. If you then find that the newer set from the same company has been updated so it still works to undo metric bolts (as it is sold) but no longer fits imperial bolts, is that company morally wrong?
Morals and ethics come into play when a company breaks good-faith promises or advertising/trade descriptions, or specifically does anti-competitive things by leveraging other monopoly positions. Since Apple has no monopoly in the OS or hardware field, and they didn't sell OS X with assurances that it would run on Atom CPUs, and in reality all they are doing is *reducing* their marketshare by disabling Atom CPUs there is no issue here.
Why exactly is is morally questionable for then to disable Atom CPUs? What promise did they break to you? How are they obligated to ensure that their product continues to work on a processor that they do not support? Why are they obligated to ensure the OS X hackintosh community can continue installing OS X on Atom-powrred netbooks?
If they don;t want you to use OS X on Atom powered Netbooks what are they "allowed to do" in your opinion that is not morally wrong? Are they allowed to try to stop you from using their (updated) product in a way they didn't intend?
I'm just curious. I don;t necessarily agree with Apple's decision here, but I don;t think they were morally wrong to make it.
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But it should be - the "bum in the street" is an extreme example, but I know many Americans (several of them close family members and friends) who are worse off than me for healthcare - they are all better off financially than me (I am a late-20s graduate in long term academia) and yet my healthcare is much better than theirs.
You say "lol" as if to mock Cuba's healthcare system, yet according to the WHO, they are ranked 39, just 2 places behind the USA - not bad for a small country under the effects of an embargo with it's extremely wealthy nearby superpower.
Why? Have you been there and experienced it for yourself?
How about ordinary Americans who cannot afford health insurance, or who can just about afford the premiums, but have to fight tooth and nail for coverage of basic things, or end up so enormously in debt that they are financially crippled because they got sick?
How's that preventative care working out for you guys? Like my friend who has been told by her doctor that she needs to take X number of glucose blood tests per day, but her insurance is telling her (ie, making a medical decision) that she only needs to do X-4 tests, and thus will only pay for that many, and that she either has to do what they say, or follow her doctor's advice and pay out of pocket for the extra supplies.
That's merely one anecdote, but it shows that while the technical "quality of care" in the US is high (it does have some of the best equipment and staff in the world), the access to that care is extremely limited for a vast, vast number of your population. IE, if you are very wealthy, or you are lucky enough to have a job that provides outstanding coverage (and are thus tied to your job), you face major barriers to entry to the US system.
Read my post to the other AC who pointed this out - the OP's point was clearly about the US system (Canadians aren't needlessly jingoistic about their healthcare system and don;t refer to it as "the number one healthcare system in the world" - ie, a Glen Beck Faux News slogan).
My point was addressing that, and the wider point about private insurance companies being a nasty cancer in any country that they operate in, not just in the US.
So, to be clear we are talking about PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES making TREATMENT DECISIONS and denying care, exactly like they do in the US - private healthcare being all about profits is not exclusive to the US you know.
I know it did - I'm not oblivious to the fact that Quebec is in Canada, however, the OP was talking about the US system.
The issue does revolve around private insurance companies though, which are a nasty, ugly part of a healthcare system regardless of the country they operate in - we have them here in the UK too and I refuse to touch them given all the horror stories I have heard about them (from UK citizens who have used them in the UK, not even including the heartbreaking stories from my US family and friends).
And in "the human brain is a simple machine that can be fixed in five minutes world" maybe you're right.
Alternatively, in the real grown up world, perhaps you don't know anything at all about how depression works.
*correction, or maybe 35th or something. I forget the exact figure - google it. It's nowhere near the top though.
Ahaahahahahahahahahaha. Oh wait, you were serious, let me laugh even harder.
Private healthcare is a very, very, very distant runner up to a properly managed universal system. Just ask someone in France or Sweden or Cuba (or gasp, even in the UK if they'd actually fix it properly) if they'd trade for the private system as it exists in the US.
There's a reason the US is ranked 67th on the list.
"Greatest healthcare in the free world, if you ignore the 66 other countries above us!"
I can do 2 and 3 right now on my un-jailbroken iPhone.
I'm also quite happy with O2, although now the exclusivity has expired in the UK, I can switch to Orange if I really want.
You could just send the iPod to Apple and they'll send you another one with a fresh battery in it. This costs money of course, but then, you do need to buy a new battery.
If you want a device with a removable battery, then the iPod is not for you. Not sure how Apple are "fucking over their customers" by selling a product that has a non-removable battery - you know before you buy it that this is the case.
It's one of those cumulative cases though, I would assume (whether they are being excessively pernickety or not), that while working on 1 computer coved in tar residue is not so bad, working on 500 might be. Just like visiting a smoke-filled bar just once might not be, but working there every day is...
I'm sure that, especially in more recent times, the service people at Apple don't have to service more than 1 tar-covered machine per day, but heading this off at the pass is just Apple's way of protecting their employees - it should be stated in the warranty though, or I'm not certain that they can enforce it.
Pay for someone else (on their own dime) who will service it instead or something if they don;t want their own employees to have to handle it.
And the Mac version of the card is different to the PC version, so they make fewer of them, thus they cost more.
Should just be an easy case of flashing a different firmware onto the card, but it affects the price.
Also, consider that almost any upgrade component from a hardware vendor will cost more than a separate self-purchased upgrade - RAM, HD, GPU, processors, etc.
Well, just going to Dell and speccing an XPS as close as I could get to the Base Mac Pro (quad core, no monitor, 4Gb ram, similar GPU [less memory on the Mac], same basic networking) the price is over $2000 before I've finished looking at things like the 4 internal, independent SATA bays on the Mac compared to the two on the Dell, the FW800 ports compared to FW400,
Or are you talking whitebox, which I addressed in my original point: don;t forget to add all of the cost of your time to build and set it up, including software, and the warranty (which is 2 years as standard on the Dell compared to 1 year for the Mac unless you extend your Applecare, but is in home for the Dell, or RTB for Mac).
A gt120 is good enough for the bulk of the tasks that will be thrown at it in the market the Mac Pro is aimed at, and if it isn't, you can upgrade it to whatever you fancy. It's not a gaming rig after all. If you are doing fancy graphical stuff with it, you tend to have specialised cards (I have a fair few from Decklink in the MPs we run). You could argue that the $2500 (or £ as I pay) "should" ensure you get a better GPU, but it's not only the graphics card you are paying for, it's everything else around it.
Remember, hobbyist, home-gamer is not the target market for a Mac Pro - thus, a cutting edge GPU with a picture of an elf rendered on the overly elaborate heatsink isn't really top of the list of priorities.
...but I make up for that with a cheap, tacky case, and other inferior or totally missing equivalent hardware if I'm really $1000 less than equivalent machines.
Don't forget to factor in your own time cost, and the cost of any warranty if you bought me whitebox and built it yourself! Also the cost of a retail copy of OS X!
I'm not a member of the Democratic party.
They're too right wing for me. I'm not a US citizen either.
The main difference here is that Obama isn't going to go to war, using this false information as backup, in the face of people clearly telling him it's wrong.
Bush stood up on that little plinth and demonstrably lied to the population, Obama didn't read these numbers off an autocue, claiming them to be the truth. If they're wrong, they'll fix it.
Well, that is if you agree with Stallman, and what you're saying is that holding Apple to Stallman's ethics because it "represents a legitimate and influential school of thought" is equivalent to me being held to a Christian's ethics because they have decided that doing something with your body is "morally wrong" (wanking, sex before marriage, abortion) and they also "represent a legitimate and influential school of thought".
It's not quite so cut and dried I don't think.
Apple here haven't actually "officially" done anything (nor have they "dropped support" for anything since they didn't support it in the first place), and they are not going around forcing people with hackintoshes to nuke and pave their HD. It's just that the latest version of 10.6 doesn't boot on Atom CPUs, whether deliberately or just through coincidence - there were no guarantees that it would work either way.
In that you should be able to do anything you like with the things you have bought, software or otherwise, I agree (within the law of course - if you use your software to defraud a bank or something then no, but you see what I mean). If you have a retail copy of OS X you should be able to do what you like with it, but similarly, Apple is free to do whatever it likes with its own code, including putting in or taking out code that doesn't pertain to its own interests.
I'm not sure you can make the argument that Apple should be morally obliged to ensure that OS X continues to run on Atom CPUs just because it did before - if this was a genuine case of some code being changed that was necessary for something else and Atom support just happened to be a casualty (rather than explictly disabling Atom support - we don;t know either way) then are they obliged to explain what happened (to a product and customer base they do not support) or fix it so that it continues to work?
I'm not seeing anyone sued over hackintoshes, apart from Psystar who are attempting to sell them - the personal user who buys a copy of OS X and a netbook is not being chased down here, but nor does he have any guarantees that Apple won;t change something so it won't work any more if they update. 10.6.1 will continue to run for them.
You mean the bad summary and the erroneous title. Apple didn't "officially" do anything, let along "drop" support for a chip it never supported in the first place.
Either way, that has nothing to do with the relative open-ness of the respective OS sources.
If you say "I think we should kill him!" in response to "what should we do with this guy!" from an angry mob of people who accuse someone of some serious crime (whether guilty or not, you have no proof) and they do , in fact kill him, then you can't use "free speech" as a defence if there's a reasonable chance that you are putting someone in jeopardy.
Similarly if you shout "bomb!" in a crowded room and people get trampled to death trying to escape when you knew it was a hoax.
Libel and slander are specific cases of veracity of the facts, or spreading information you know to be true but that is damaging anyway.
Feel free. I am no more the general Apple user than the guy who buys one because the colour matches his Porsche Cayenne.
My post was not a generalisation.
No, pretty sure where flamebait means exactly that. Your post is hardly a calm and measured discussion on the merits on the potential downsides to OS X versus Windows and the diligence or lack thereof of Apple in regard to the OSS code that it ships.
Pretty sure you were merely spoiling for a fight rather than actually attempting to discuss it.
I'm sure you do, but your assertion that "OS X is even more locked down than Windows" is a little bit a stretch, surely. How much of the Windows source is open? How much of OS X? Clearly both are closed OSes, but the core of OS X is a lot more open than Windows.
On the second point, some citations would be nice. Apple is moaned at a lot for their contributions to the OSS community and their "theft" from it (funny, I thought it was free) especially in cases like Webkit/KHTML and Darwin itself.
So, what currently unaddressed security hole exists in the open source stuff Apple ships? Are you claiming that Apple doesn't update the OSS stuff it ships in security updates? Are you claiming they specifically ignore security holes?
What's to stop you from rolling your own implementations of these vulnerable services on OS X if they are open source and you need to run them but are concerned that the shipped Apple version is insecure, assuming that the current OSS version has also been patched, or are you claiming that because Apple doesn't push a patch down on OS X the very same day a patch to the OSS stuff is done by a third party because they may need to test it on their internal OS X builds first that they are "abysmal at keeping up to date".
But for how long?
Perhaps they are going to phase out OS X support on non-SSE4 CPUs, which is not reasonable for them right now since they have near-current products in this category, but as in the case of PPC support being dropped, it may well happen.
Whether they start doing this now on per-processor basis and it affects Atom or do it later when they are ready to drop support for Core Solo (or whatever the last CPU they shipped with no SSE4) makes no difference to them because they never supported Atom in the first place and nipping the Atom issue in the bud now may just be extra gravy.
Please note that calling people stupid as the primary crux of your argument generally isn't helpful. Try to be civil.
What about blaming people who bought (or "obtained") OS X and ran it on a chipset that nowhere on earth has Apple ever said is supported?
When it stops working, perhaps they share perhaps a tiny bit of the blame...?
If you use a product in a way it was never designed for (successfully, legally, illegally, imaginatively, any-which-way-but-lose) and it later stops working (for any reason, expected or unexpected) then you are back to the situation you had when you started out: "This may work, but there are no guarantees, and it may not work in the future if things change".
Not necessarily, although a combination of funny and insightful would probably be appropriate.
Not all people who buy Apple products are out to fluff their ego, just like not all people who buy Dells are too dumb to assemble their own from whitebox parts, or all people who run Linux are too cheap to spend money on an OS.
Huge generalisations really help no one. Regardless of your personal opinion on the "Apple experience", there really is something to it for some people - I personally love having a machine (white intel iMac) that I can carry in a box with a handle over to my friend's house for a quick game night, that runs OS X and XP, takes 5 minutes to pack and unpack, doesn't have to worry about antivirus and malware issues (but is still security conscious enough to understand that we're not and never likely to be 'immune' to security threats), and don;t consider myself better than anyone else because I use a Mac.
The computer I own ticks all the right boxes for what I want to use it for - it's a tool (albeit a very nice looking tool - also a consideration, but not the only one). I'm sure there are PCs out there that are all-in-one and come in a box that has a handle on it that make it easy to transport it like a suitcase, protected by the original packing it came in from the factory, but can that one run OS X out of the box with no need to modify it?
It's not like I went into the store and said "I want to buy a computer that shows how much better I am than everyone else" - I bought the one that fitted my needs best, and was prepared to pay the money for it. The cost of an all-in-one is more than worth it for the convenience of moving it, and the way it looks, and the fact I can run both OS X and XP as needed (calm down, I have Ubuntu on a Powerbook) really does make it an ideal single main machine.
They make a product that you are using. They are in no way morally obligated to provide it to you in a way *you* want.
There is no ethics issue with them explicitly disabling functionality in their product for something they do not sell just because you found out that you could get it to work with non-standard hardware.
If you buy a socket set and discover that while it's calibrated in metric and sold as a metric socket set to work with metric bolts, that it can still just about undo imperial bolts then great - you don't need a second imperial set. If you then find that the newer set from the same company has been updated so it still works to undo metric bolts (as it is sold) but no longer fits imperial bolts, is that company morally wrong?
Morals and ethics come into play when a company breaks good-faith promises or advertising/trade descriptions, or specifically does anti-competitive things by leveraging other monopoly positions. Since Apple has no monopoly in the OS or hardware field, and they didn't sell OS X with assurances that it would run on Atom CPUs, and in reality all they are doing is *reducing* their marketshare by disabling Atom CPUs there is no issue here.
Why exactly is is morally questionable for then to disable Atom CPUs? What promise did they break to you? How are they obligated to ensure that their product continues to work on a processor that they do not support? Why are they obligated to ensure the OS X hackintosh community can continue installing OS X on Atom-powrred netbooks?
If they don;t want you to use OS X on Atom powered Netbooks what are they "allowed to do" in your opinion that is not morally wrong? Are they allowed to try to stop you from using their (updated) product in a way they didn't intend?
I'm just curious. I don;t necessarily agree with Apple's decision here, but I don;t think they were morally wrong to make it.