apple.ism

A guest post written by Brendan (@bigplrbear) - view original article here

Recently, I’ve been in the market for a netbook. Something small and cheap- a toy that I can mess with over the summer, and actually get productive with in the fall/winter at college. So, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on Netbooks, when I found that certain models (particularly the MSI Wind) are favourites for Apple-wannabe’s and Hackint0shers. I even stumbled upon a YouTube video of some random guy showing off Leopard on his netbook-

Now, we all like the idea of a $400 Mac laptop- not all of us have $1,000 to spend on an entry level MacBook. But what are the costs of going the cheap-o route and running Leopard on an Atom N270/N280?

• First problem- Macbooks now a days come with at least dual-core processors. Because of this, Leopard is optimized to use multiple cores, and it really doesn’t like having any less than two. Anybody who’s used Leopard on a single-core machine (ESPECIALLY if it’s an AMD) knows that it can be very picky. Also, the low clock (1.33ghz-1.66ghz) and front side bus speeds (444mhz-650mhz) of the processor just aren’t suited for such a massive OS

• Second problem- Leopard is optimized for 64-bit processors. While some models of the Atom processor (1.6ghz and 1.66ghz) have 64-bit compatibility, the others do not and instead opt for a lower clock speed (1.33ghz) and VM support. While Leopard does have 32-bit backwards compatibility, the next iteration of MacOS (Snow Leopard) will rely heavily, almost completely, on 64-bit technologies such as SSE4. Also, the fact that some of these processors aren’t 64-bit just makes the speed problem worse.

• Third problem- the graphics chip (usually a low-end intel chip), while is compatible with Leopard, is very low-end, and uses the RAM for its memory cache. This can eat up as much as 196Mb of the computers RAM, which is a big problem because most netbooks only come with 512Mb-1Gb of RAM. Luckily, you can upgrade most netbooks memory using a standard DDR2 module- but not usually over 2GB. Although this is usually sufficient for a Mac (MacBooks come standard with 2Gb of RAM), their processors, front side busses, and RAM are faster than a netbooks.

• Fourth problem- General compatibility. MacOS, like Linux, is horrible at 3rd party wifi card support, amongst other 3rd party hardware (such as video cards, sound cards, etc.). MacOS is meant to be run on a Mac, not a PC.

• Fifth problem- Screen resolution. Most netbooks have a screen resolution of 1024x600. Knowing MacOS, being as picky as it is, it’s going to try and default at 1024x768. Since most netbooks’ screens can’t display that resolution, the result is a black screen of death. Luckily, if your graphics hardware is correctly found by Leopard, you may have no problems with this. On the plus side, the dock and taskbar actually save more space than the Windows taskbar. Go figure

• Sixth problem- Hard drives and CD/DVD drives (or lack there of). Alot of the lower end netbooks have 4,8, and 16GB SSDs. While they’re nice and fast, and appropriate for a netbook whose sole purpose in life is to get you on to digg.com, they are not going to be big enough for Leopard to run off of. In order to run Leopard, you would have to either change out the HDD, or buy a netbook with more room. Oh yeah, did I also mention that netbooks have no CD/DVD drive? Good luck putting Leopard on a flash drive and booting from that.

• Seventh problem- it’s illegal (unless you happen to own an extra Leopard license). Leopard is supposed to be run on a Mac, NOT a PC! Besides, it’s just a pain in the butt to do- One has to go through many hoops to get Leopard on a PC. First you need to recompile the BSD kernel so it doesn’t search for the TPM chip, then you need to change some other system files and recompile them, etc. etc. If you’re too lazy to do all of that, you could of course grab a pre-hacked Leopard image from a torrent site, but the chances that it will update via Apples secure update program AND still run are slim. And then you have the software, which is designed with a 2.0ghz Core 2 duo processor, and not an Atom 1.33ghz, in mind.

For most people, if you try to install Leopard on your netbook, you’ll end up throwing a bitch fit because of how much it sucks. And I wouldn’t disagree with you. Leopard DOES suck- ON A NETBOOK. Trust me, you’re better off installing Windows Vista on your netbook- it will be slow as hell, but at least (most of) your hardware will work correctly.