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Is Apple's rumoured Hackintosh block an opening salvo for the iTablet?

by Julian Prokaza on Monday 02 November 2009 Comment

There’s a rumour circulating on tech news web sites that the next update to Mac OS Snow Leopard, 10.6.2, disables support for Intel’s Atom processor. If true, the obvious implication is that Apple wants to stem the burgeoning number ‘ Hackintosh’ netbooks and clamp down on the unlicensed use of its operating system, but is this really likely?

Mac OS 10.6.2 is only available to developers as a beta release at the moment, and the Atom news comes from a single, small blog post by one them. The StellaRola blog states that:

In the current developer build of 10.6.2, Apple appears to have changed around a lot of CPU related information. One of the effects of this is Apple killing off Intel’s Atom chip.

That’s it — there’s no other supporting evidence, nor does there appear to be confirmation from anyone else with access to Mac OS 10.6.2. This hasn’t stopped the story from spreading like wildfire, though.

Given Apple’s cat and mouse tactics with Palm over the Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that it’s planning on stopping Mac OS 10.6.2 from running on the Atom processor (although how this could be technically achieved is open to question). The problem is why it would want to do it.

A Palm Pre that can sync with iTunes is an obvious competitor to the iPhone, but a £300 netbook that can run Mac OS is most definitely not a competitor to a £799 MacBook. Many Hackintosh solutions do involve downloading illegally cracked copies of the operating system, but Apple clearly isn’t too concerned about Snow Leopard piracy — the £29 upgrade edition of Mac OS 10.6 contains no copy protection and can be used for a clean install on any compatible Mac.

So, it all seems pretty unlikely to us — unless… Stopping Mac OS from running on netbooks would make sense if Apple is readying a similar product of its own. The company has stated that it has no interest in the low-cost netbook market, but it is strongly suspected of having a tablet Mac in the works. So, should Mac OS 10.6.2 really drop support for Intel Atom processors, it could well be the strongest evidence yet that an Apple tablet is on the way.

[ StellaRola]

Originally published on www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk, now incorporated into Broadband Genie

 

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