[X4U] OSX System/Carbon Copy Cloner question

[Eddie Hargreaves]

On 2/14/05 5:30 PM, Jon Warms <jwarms at mac.com> wrote:

> 2) Are OS X installations on our Macs complete, or are they stripped or
> parameterized for our specific Mac?

Sometimes there is a build of OS X that is specific to a model. For
instance, when the G5s were introduced, they had a different build of OS X
than was currently available to all other machines via Software Update. This
can be seen in About This Mac by clicking on the version number. However,
once the next version is released for download (10.2.7, for example) any
model that is supported to run OS X can update to that version and the
resulting system can then be transferred to another machine.

For instance, the Mac mini may be using a specific build of 10.3.7 and will
not be able to run correctly if you clone an older machine's 10.3.6 system
to it. But now that 10.3.8 has been released, you could update the older
machine to 10.3.8 and clone it to the Mac mini without problem. Chip-type is
not really relevant as all G3, G4 and G5 machines use the same system. The
newer ones just take advantage of features the older ones cannot. This
applies to video cards, also.

Eddie Hargreaves