10.6.2 Drops Atom Support, It’s End Of Line For Hackintoshes

Leander Kahney ()

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From now on, all Hackintoshes may be stuck at 10.6.1.

Hackintosh hackers have confirmed that 10.6.2 drops support for Intel’s Atom chips.

Writes leading hacker StelaRolo:

“The netbook forums are now blowing up with problems of 10.6.2 instant rebooting their Atom based netbooks. My sources tell me that everytime a netbook user installs 10.6.2 an Apple employee gets their wings.”

What’s this mean? StelaRolo says that a hacked kernel will likely appear, but Apple is clerly nuking the Hackintosh market.

In addition, Apple will not likely release any future hardware based on Intel’s Atom platform. Instead, Apple will concentrate on ARM-based hardware, the same platform as the iPhone. That includes the upcoming tablet.

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Mac OS X 10.6.2 Drops Atom Processor Support

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“Apple bought a processor-building company called PA Semi two years ago, in order to build chips for iPhones, said Steve Jobs. The chips that this new Apple division make will likely be the chips that power Apple’s tablet and even future laptops.”

12 comments »

About the author

Leander Kahney

is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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Posted in Apple, Hardware Hacks, News |

  • Fuzzypig

    Atom support drop is a shame actually, it’s the main reason I bought my MacBook. I had 10.5.7 on an Acer Aspire and it was fantastic, some bits didn’t work quite right and I really wanted a larger screen on the go, so I thought “stuff it”, and went out and bought a genuine MacBook, took a hit in the finances for a month or two. I already had two iMacs at home, but I wasn’t prepared to commit to OSX on a laptop, until I had played with it on a $150 netbook.

    Point is, it convinced me to buy more Apple kit, benefit for Apple’s cachet and finances and ultimately my computing experience.

    I’m sure the Hackin’tosh community will find a way to get it moving again, but somehow it won’t be the same, now it will be a genuine hack.

  • http://www.szilveszter.ca WS

    Fuzzypig,

    And for everyone like you, there will be one that will want OS X so bad on their notebook but can’t run it do to a lack of kernel drivers, that they’ll suck it up and go out and buy a Mac.

    The universe will balance itself and all will be right again for Apple. I’m not condoning or dismissing Apple’s behaviour, but at the end of the day, I’d rather not have cruft in my OS, no matter how small.

    Mo’ code = mo’ problems.

  • Oskar

    From Apple’s point of view, this is the only reasonable move in my opinion. Since they don’t have any hardware of their own, why bother supporting it for the hackintosh community? Yes, I can agree that to a certain extent, tinkering with your own cheap PC hardware may drive some customers towards Apple, but I can’t see it being too important. They would already have made up their mind to give it a try, so they will likely run it on their desktop PC instead. After all, not many people owns a netbook and no other computer. Considering the pretty low performance of the Atom processor (see e.g. http://gizmodo.com/5145454/benchmarking-the-ibook-vs-a-hackintosh-nebook ), I can also imagine the Apple folks not wanting anyone to experience OS X with such low hardware specs. Older processors will always be phased out – even the quad PPCs are now officially unsupported, though that has more to do with architecture than actual performance. Shame on intel by the way for not making the chipsets as power efficient as the atom processor. The northbridge of a typical Atom based system typically draws three to four times as much power as the processor. Should Apple choose to make a netbook it will likely be dual core and possibly implement some cool PA Semi techs as well.

  • Sam

    My atom based hackintosh is working PERFECTLY with 10.6.2 as are all the ones updated using Lifehacker tool… Simple, easy and no issues updating to 10.6.2

  • http://www.sullysrants.com Sully

    GOOD! Down with the Hackintosh! Apple makes quality software on quality hardware… If you want a POS system buy a PC.

  • Lauren

    What Sully means is, “Thank you Apple, can I bend over a little further?”

    The hardware in Apples and PCs is mostly, sometimes entirely, the same as you find in a PC. The processor, GPU, hard drives… all from the same production lines as PC hardware. I use macs for heavy video/graphics work, and they have the same issues PCs do when performing rigorous tasks — they occasionally crash, hang, freeze, lose data, experience hard drive/powersource failure and cause data corruption. They’re machines.

    Anyone who buys a Mac to word process/surf is just a fanboy/girl. Enjoy your brand name markup Sully — if you ever actually push that Mac, you’ll be whining about how the man sabotaged your ficticious “perfect computer” from back in the day.

  • http://ObamaPacman.com Obama Pacman

    @ Lauren

    There are many reasons why people choose Macs, for example no OS X viruses, or actually, lower total cost of ownership.

    Why Danish Police choose Macs
    http://obamapacman.com/2009/10/danish-police-high-tech-control-center-runs-on-apple-computers/

  • Martin

    I’ve completely moved my house (I bought 2 Mac laptops from Apple) over to the mac after having spent time on the hackintosh first.

    Using it in the shop is not the same thing.

  • charli

    i have zero sympathy for the hackintosh community’s complaints on this one. Apple currently has a little right to restrict the hardware used by their OS and they aren’t doing anything with Atom. so why clutter up Snow Leopard with support it doesn’t need or use at the moment. sucks for those that went HackMac but are you so crazy as to think that Apple owes you support when you are costing them hardware sales and in the US very likely breaking the law as well. cause they don’t

    just like they don’t have to ensure that an itunes update doesn’t break syncing for Palm’s phones, that the new iphone software doesn’t brick hacked phones etc.

  • ged

    every update of my Apple computers has been flawless since OS 9.6 to 10.2.
    Most of the computers in my lab with a Redmond OS are stuck at win 2000, as there is no simple way to update the HD.
    Having said that the most stable computer in my life was made by IBM in 1995 and runs NT! It has been running more or less continuously for ever.
    Any Apple Computer Inc user here report similar performance from their PowerMac 6100?

  • rauy

    at least get your names right :) It’s Stellarola

  • jcr

    Lauren,
    You have no idea what you are talking about. I use my macs mainly for word processing and surfing. Macs still render fonts better than any other OS. OpenOffice: no ligatures, no use of extended character sets. MS Word: ligatures, but no use of extended character sets. Pages: ligatures (system-wide on Mac OS) and use of extended character sets.

    Furthermore, the way that my computers around the house can share the same printer, share files, and share music is worth some money to me. I know I can do this with PCs, but I didn’t have to do anything to get this to work with my Macs. Who the hell are you to question people’s motives?