Comment by icebraining
13 years ago
I don't get the whining either; I was just dispelling a myth.
That said, I don't find your arguments compelling; there's a difference between supporting and just not artificially preventing the software from running, and I don't see how doing the latter would make OSX stop "just working" on officially supported machines.
In fact, it's not like they don't anyway, and I don't see how have Hackintoshes diluted the experience of OSX on an Apple machine.
If Apple sold it as an operating system, they'd have to deal with a nightmare of drivers. As it stands one disk can cover almost every Mac ever made, and they're content with that.
Sure, but they wouldn't have to sell it as an operating system just to remove the artificial restrictions. They could still support only their machines, and just not encrypt the binaries and all that nonsense.
But I'm not saying they should, as I said, I don't really care. I'm just saying that just because they don't want to support other machines, that doesn't mean they have to purposely block them.
I mean, Asus doesn't support Linux on their motherboards either, but they don't have BIOS checks verifying that the OS is supported and refusing to boot if it isn't; they just tell you "you're on your own".
> they don't have BIOS checks verifying that the OS is supported and refusing to boot if it isn't
In fact the machines they're selling now almost certainly do have precisely this. It's called 'secure boot', and caused a lot of controversy. The major Linux distributions work because they've managed to get themselves signed with the appropriate key so the BIOS accepts them, but if you want to put a more niche distribution on there, you probably have to disable that check in the BIOS.
1 reply →