[MacDV] Re: The 20inch LCD Conspiracy

[Michael Winter]

On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 07:20  PM, Gerhard Kuhn wrote:

> No they do not support anything prior to M.E. but they don't prevent 
> you from setting up a Pentium 4 that will boot in DOS, Windows 3.1, 
> 95, 98, M.E., and XP.

And when you boot in DOS it supports USB, Firewire, SCSI, Gigabit 
ethernet, LCD displays, DVD drives and everything else? Where can I 
find this version of DOS?

> On the other hand Apple wants you to use the one O.S. that they think 
> you should be happy with.  I for one want to be able to make the 
> choice as to how I use my hardware and not be told what is good for > me!

Nobody, particularly Apple, is telling you "what is good for (you)".

Does everyone understand that Apple did not go out of their way to 
"cripple" new machines so they won't boot OS 9?

Does everyone understand that Apple would have to spend a good deal of 
resources developing and testing drivers to make OS 9 run on new 
hardware?

Isn't it just possible that the reason Apple needed a new base for 
their OS is because OS <9 had so many additions, extensions and patches 
to get it to support such a wide array of hardware and API's over the 
years that the code was getting nearly impossible to maintain and 
troubleshoot, much less add more to?

It could very easily take 10x more in the way of coding and testing to 
get Firewire 800 running on OS 9 than it did to get it running in OS X. 
They can't just take the code that works in X and paste it into 9. OS 9 
simply doesn't have the kinds of clean hooks into every level of the OS 
that X does.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see the engineering or business sense in 
continuing to support booting into an old OS. All those resources would 
be better spent on improving OS X and even making Classic work better 
in OS X (IMO).

I apologize for the ranting tone, but every company has to make 
business decisions and for every decision there are going to be people 
getting left behind. I know it can be painful, because I've been there 
enough myself. I just hope people will try to take an objective look at 
why Apple makes its decisions and not automatically assume its because 
of some dark conspiracy.

-Mike