Subject: Re: Ease Of Use and Hardware Support (WAS: Linux Laptops)
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Mar 08 2002 - 20:10:26 MST
At 7:55 PM -0600 3/7/02, Robert Brandtjen wrote:
>On Thursday 07 March 2002 06:36 pm, Timothy A. Seufert wrote:
>> Speaking of which, I doubt any drivers from OS X Server 1.x survive
>> in MacOS X 10.0 onwards. Apple created a new driver architecture and
>> moved to it partway through the MacOS X 10 beta releases. This
>> required them to port or wholly rewrite all drivers.
>
>I have both operating systems here at my disposal - the early drivers (as I
>recall - but its been a year) were the exact same name - in fact, the tulip
>drivers for the supported 4 port ethernet were the same - remember, these
>people could use them before.
As I said, port or rewrite. Yes, some names may be similar. But
there are no old style non-IOKit drivers left.
[old OS X devel stuff ran on old hardware]
>OSX 10 beta loaded just fine on PCI Macs - I know, because I did it.
I did too.
>Thats
>also why it was relatively trivial to hack together an install for 10.1 and
>so forth - now the only reason why Apple would do this is to drive hardware
>sales -
Far from the only possible reason. A couple that come to mind: To
limit the size of the testing matrix, and to allow then to implement
fancy features with the assumption of a certain baseline CPU.
Nor are the unsupported machine hacks entirely trivial any more.
Used to be simple because all the pieces were on the install CD.
With release versions of MacOS X, they aren't.
Fortunately for the user community Apple was gracious enough to
include the source code for the missing platform support drivers in
Darwin. With a bit of work to polish the drivers up (obviously Apple
didn't spend the effort to make them release quality since they
weren't going on the CD), older machines were able to fly again. So
if Apple had really wanted to slam the door they could have done so.
They did not.
But I really don't see why you're bringing any of this up. It has
nothing to do with your outrageous claims about Apple intentionally
damaging support for the Beige G3 in 10.1.3, with the blue & white G3
and third party video cards supposedly next on the chopping block.
Great, you're bitter that Apple dropped support for some machines
before the release of 10.0.0. That doesn't mean you ought to spread
unsubstantiated FUD claiming they're dropping support for more
hardware as we speak.
>Its also hobbled the early iMacs - and both of those machines are "fully
>supported" according to apple.
"Hobbled" how? Yeah yeah, I KNOW it doesn't support every feature of
the Rage II/Pro video chip. But I don't think the missing features
(movie/DVD playback and 3D accel) were EVER supported on Rage Pro in
any version of X -- and you seem to be saying that Apple removed some
capability somewhere along the line in order to deliberately cripple
them.
As an aside, it would behoove you to find a place where Apple
actually says "fully supported" or similar. You probably won't have
much luck. (One of the reasons the class action lawsuit is probably
doomed.)
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Fri Mar 08 2002 - 20:25:40 MST