Apple's underhanded move
Posted on January 27, 2003
Revised February 7, 2003:
Since Steve Jobs returned to Apple, things certainly haven't been the same. But the Apple customer has always expected fair business practices, and for the most part, received it. In January of 2003, this long-standing trust in Apple's brand was sorely misplaced.
The issue at hand is the deliberate manipulation of all new Macintosh models so that they would not be able to boot into OS 9. Since Apple has refused to answer any questions about the details, many are guessing that the new models will have their ROM chips modified.
Let's all understand this move for what it is: Purely a marketing manouver intended to force the Macintosh user to switch to OS X because of poor early adoption of the new operating system. This kind of transition is not new to Apple, as those of us who remember the arrival of the Power PC models can attest. However, the Power PC switch was necessary because of a fundamental change in both the processor chip and the motherboard architecture. There is no such drastic change in hardware this time.
'So what?' you ask. Macintosh users have generally been eager to move forward with new versions of the operating system. So what's different now? OS X. This is not a newer version of OS 9. It's a completely different operating system. You might as well think of it as a pretty version of Unix, rather than Macintosh. Even today, about a year after OS X was released, most people are very cautious and hesitant about switching. It's hard to blame them, when there are so many critics of OS X in the media.
I have no problem with a company that tries to promote their new products. But to force an entire user base to switch by using an underhanded tactic like this is something to be expected from Microsoft, not Apple. I'm not asking Apple to continue spending resources on supporting OS 9: They could completely ignore OS 9 for all I care. All I want is for Apple not to sabotage their new hardware so that we can't install an older operating system on it. Instead, they should listen to all the feedback from their users and fix the existing problems with OS X. What better way is there to entice users to switch than to provide an excellent product?
Update, February 7, 2003:
A recent visitor to this site forwarded a link to an article from MacFixit, which has some persuasive arguments about why Apple is forcing the no-OS-9-boot issue. I have no experience in hardware engineering, but I must suspect Apple's motives here, because they have shown very little consideration to its user base since OS X was released. Bottom line: Even if this forced move was necessary, it was still handled very badly by Apple. At the very least, they should have delayed the forced switch until the majority of problems with OS X were fixed.
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