[MacDV] The New Towers - (formerly "refurbished G4")

[Michael Winter]

On Saturday, January 25, 2003, at 11:29  AM, KathyMac! wrote:

> So, I guess the question is: Why can't we take home one of these new 
> towers
> that are only bootable in X and wipe the drive clean, reformat it, and
> partition it with both 9 and X? I was told it couldn't be done but I'd 
> like
> to know why.

IMO the major reason for it not working is that OS 9 may not have the 
driver support necessary for the new hardware. The new Macs could have 
a redesigned motherboard supporting things like 800 Mbps Firewire, USB 
2, Bluetooth, a new processor, different RAM, different bus 
architecture....  And OS 9 does not have the necessary drivers for all 
this stuff and it would take considerable effort to add it to OS 9. 
That's why new machines won't boot OS 9, its not that Apple is 
deliberately crippling them in this regard as some seem to think.

I should say that all the hardware tweaks I mentioned are just 
examples, I don't know what kind of hardware enhancements are in line 
for the new Macs.

-Mike