[HN Gopher] Hacking the Mac OS X Kernel for Unsupported Machines...
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       Hacking the Mac OS X Kernel for Unsupported Machines (2005) [pdf]
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2024-07-16 22:26 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (papers.put.as)
 (TXT) w3m dump (papers.put.as)
        
       | bluedino wrote:
       | I remember following the guides to get OS X 10.3 installed on G3
       | machines...
       | 
       | What was the reason for that bug preventing OS X booting on older
       | machines?
        
         | yardie wrote:
         | The reason was to force you into buying a new Mac. For example,
         | the 2014 and 2015 rMBP are literally the same hardware. Same
         | CPU, same GPU, same wifi chips. The only difference was one had
         | a physical trackpad and the newer used a haptic trackpad. The
         | last officially released OS for rMBP 2014 was MacOS 11, and
         | rMBP 2015 was MacOS 12. There was nothing in the OS that
         | prevented future OSes from running on a 5 year old Macbook
         | except Apple didn't want it.
        
           | WesolyKubeczek wrote:
           | The most beautiful (as in "beautifully evil") aspect of it is
           | that you don't need to do anything to make this "planned
           | obsolescence" happen. You just develop stuff under time
           | pressure (of course) while pretending those slightly older
           | machines don't exist. So if an old driver gives you grief
           | because it needs some find/replace work, you just don't care,
           | you yank it wholesale.
           | 
           | Note that open source projects employ the same tactics. Act
           | I: "oh, we made our thing compile in Wayland-only mode, but
           | don't worry, you can still configure --with-x11". Act II:
           | "Now that most distributions we think matter are shipping
           | Wayland-only builds, we deprecate the X code". Act III: "Oh
           | the --with-x11 started causing compilation errors or bugs, we
           | decided to yank it off and also close all 22 MRs that were
           | fixing these exact errors".
           | 
           | So, don't ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to CADT and
           | budget cuts.
        
           | wpm wrote:
           | The 2014 models could have come with an nVidia GPU. They are
           | not the same boards at all, which means that it's not just a
           | "to hell with the 2014".
           | 
           | There's more to a computer than a spec sheet.
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-17 23:12 UTC)