Brian GarnerAccording to the developer blog which initially told of the Atom incompatibility, the latest build of OS X 10.6.2 does retain support for Atom chips. It was previously reported that support for the Intel chip had been dropped, a move that many believed was Apple's attempt to stop the small but burgeoning "Hackintosh" netbook community. This all may change when the final 10.6.2 build is released, but as of now Atom support has returned.
Intel's Atom processor is a low-power, low-cost chip which is intended for notebooks and ultra-mobile PCs. No current Apple products use the chip, but a community has formed around installing Snow Leopard on so called "Hackintosh" netbook PCs which use the Atom processor. This unauthorized use of Apple's operating system has grown in popularity since the release of small, inexpensive notebooks such as the Dell Mini 10v, which allowed for easy installs of OS X.
Last year, it was reported that an executive at Intel had publicly vouched for the Atom processor to be used in Apple's tablet. With the buyout of chip designer P.A. Semi, many believe that Apple is instead designing its own chips for the platform.
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42 Comments
rumoring around... it's soo cool!
Maybe it was just a bug? Incomplete work? Details in that blog post on exactly what broke and why are practically nonexistent. Developer seeds aren't the final word anyway. It sounds like something in the software was refactored and the work wasn't finished.
I don't think it matters what you're running, hackintosh or not, you should do a backup before doing any updates. Updates change system files, you never know if the software encounters an unexpected condition or there is some kind of power loss or data hiccup in the computer.
rumoring around... it's soo cool!
brings in the eyballs though, doesn't it?
Even if it was intentional, I suspect Apple realized that anything they could do, the Hackintosh community can undo (with time). They're already in an arms race with regards to iPhone jailbreaking. They don't need to open another front. It just eats up limited programming resources that would be better used stomping bugs and improving features.
It was either a bug that happened to also break other things and was corrected or there was just a little too much bad press on the subject and Apple figured the effort wasn't worth it.