Apple Dishes Out Update To Snow Leopard, Spells Trouble For ‘Hackintoshes’

Jonathan Lovelock | Nov 11, 2009 | View Comments

snow-leopard-wallpaper In a recent move, Apple has released updates to its flagship OS named Snow Leopard. This is the second major update Apple unveiled post the debut of Snow Leopard. The new version labeled Mac OS X v.10.6.2 contains a plethora of updates to the Core OS as well as a number of bundled applications. However, this update is likely to put an end to the Mac using experience of the newly developed Hackintosh community. These are basically netbooks running Apple’s Mac OS X.

The online Hackintosh forums are abuzz with rumors that Apple wants to stop the net book users from using Snow Leopard. The netbooks mostly use Intel’s low powered Atom Processor which Apple does not support officially. The Hackintosh users have already posted in the blog sites about their netbooks going through several reboots after installing the update to Snow Leopard.

Apple, on its part says that the update is crucial to fix a lot of user problems that have surfaced after the global release of Snow Leopard. This includes an internal flaw in Front Row that resulted in poor frame rates while watching videos. Apart from this, the new update fixes various stability issues in applications like iLife, iWork and Final Cut Studio. There is a complete list of the updates and descriptions put up in the Apple site.

However, Apple has not made any official statement about discontinuing the support for Intel Atom CPUs in that page. The management in Apple does not look at netbooks favorably. Besides, the idea of the netbook users running Snow Leopard without Apple’s approval is not welcome to the company. Along with significant application specific performance improvements, the update addresses near about 60 security issues. Traditionally, Macs are less prone to virus and hackers. Nevertheless, Apple did not lose any time in boosting the security standard of Snow Leopard after Microsoft’s release of Windows 7, an OS that boasts of better security.

A vulnerability in Snow Leopard’s Adaptive Firewall and several flaws in Quick Time’s latest version have also been addressed by this update. Apple has been on an OS release overdrive for some time. It released the updates for its iPod Touch and iPhone in the recent past. While this might dampen the spirit of the existing Hackintosh users, some of them are likely to offer a workaround that can break into the updated OS and make it run on Intel Atom based netbooks once again. Till that happens, the Mac OS lovers have to be content with the Psystar notebooks as these machines do not use the Atom chip.

Apple is known for resisting third party manufacturers from using its technology or products freely. The tussle Apple has with Palm is well known in the industry. Every time Palm releases a smart phone compatible with Apple’s iTunes, Apple updates the software to ensure that the Palm devices cannot work with it. A few days back Apple updated iTunes to version 9.0.2 to ensure incompatibility with the newly launched Palm Pre.