Today I booted up the old Mac and noticed a gift from Apple, a new update! This is officially Mac OS X 10.6.2 for Snow Leopard. The biggest part of this update is that Apple finally decided to address a major bug that would cause guest accounts to delete part of your OS. I guess 2 months and 7 days since first reported is better then never.
There were also rumors that this update might eliminate support for Intel Atom processors. Why would Apple do this you ask? Well the Atom processor is mostly used in mobile computers like Netbooks. Many folks have bought a Netbook and turned it into a “Hackintosh”, and you know how Apple is about stuff like that. I might be more sympathetic to Apple’s basic argument that they are a hardware company first and they sell an OS, which they want to control and keep stable. The only problem is that the Netbook is a growing market and Apple has no product that even compares to what the Netbook offers. Their cheapest laptop is $999, I can get a decent Netbook for about $250-300 bucks. If I could throw Snow Leopard on there, I’d be mighty interested. Apple is not going to cannibalize their market by allowing these Hackintoshes, people who are going to install Mac OS on a Netbook were never going to buy a Macbook anyway.