The Consolidated B&EC "today I learned" Thread.

shut up and buy a new mac.

 

BRB donning a black skivvie while taking notes in my moleskine pad about a minimalist dock for my new Macbook Air.

Also remembering to complain to IT that they aren't supplying me with USB-C everything, even though it's BYOD and I bought something not compatible with any enterprise hardware or software in the business.

 

Nobody would ever accuse Apple of planned obsolescence, surely not! It's not like there's a class action in place over Apple deliberately slowing down older devices or anything

I do like USB-C, but cannot fathom how having a single port (which is required for charging) could ever get through engineering. I can only imagine the arguments between the industrial designers and the electrical engineers in regards to eliminating every port. Every self respecting engineer I know wants more expandability, not less!

 

Apple have zero of these on staff.

They do, however, pride themselves in their diversity employment reports, because clearly arbitrary pigeon holing of people's ethnicity and gender matters more than making good computers and software.

 

This is the biggest reason i can't get behind Apple. El Capitan and Snow Mavericks (whatever preceeded El) is *significantly* slower on that era hardware - to the point where most people who actually "use" computers, don't upgrade. The other is that i don't default to wanting/needing a bash/bash-like shell. I'm quite fine bouncing between Windows CLI / PS and Gui.

Elvis - have you given thought to just binning Apple Hardware entirely and running hackintoshes?

 

Isn't that in itself a license violation?

 

buy a fkn mac mini, put it in the corner.

 

No I mean, isn't the entire concept of a 'hackintosh' a breach of OSX's EULA? You know, thou shalt not runneth apple software on non-apple hardware, so sayeth our lord and savior steve jobs..

 

oh for sure.

but if you gotta actually get work done - and Apple's hardware refresh is 472987642 months away - and inadequate when they show up anyway.

 

it's amazing how well they work, have one in a cupboard for over 2 years and still works, you know the power point for the dish washer? was a double one so i used it for the mac mini, wife only discovered the mac mine a few days ago and said "hey there is a fucking computer attached to the dish washer" i'm like ... yeah that's the thing that does all the movies, music and runs the AppleTV

 

Ok, I was just thinking more in context of the previous conversation about licensing, seemed to me suggesting something which is technically unable to be licensed probably wouldn't be on elvis's radar..

 

Its a different standpoint if you own software for and use it in an "unapproved" way - to not owning software for it.

I highly suspect that elvis has categorically ruled it out - just wondering if it crossed his mind tho

 

Splitting Hairs.

I own a stack of Windows 7 Licenses

But I cant use them for my Windows 7 VDI environment.

You Own a license for OsX on Mac hardware.

Unapproved isn't a word that comes into it. Licensed, or Unlicensed is... Hackintosh is unlicensed?

 

We're going to tell the customer involved in my previous post exactly that - We're installing whatever was before Mavericks and they shouldn't upgrade.

Unapproved/unsupported is very different to unlicensed. The agreement is that you run it on XYZ, and Apple don't license you to do anything else.

 

Except 7 on VDI is always enterprise. You have a valid path.

OSX on not shit hardware doesn't have a valid path.

 

I don't understand this what you're getting at.

It may be morally OK to do something if there is no upgrade path provided, but that doesn't make it legally OK.

 

Of course.

 

I've done a lot of reading on this. Bit of a grey area with lots of legal double-speak. However from what I can tell, it doesn't fall under copyright infringement, but does go against the terms of an EULA. Simply going against the EULA doesn't make something "illegal". All it does is give Apple an out to not support the software in that configuration.

Because OSX is dollar-free, and the only legal requirement to run 1 physical copy of OSX and two virtualised copies of OSX is to own one Apple computer, running a "hackintosh" is theoretically legal as long as that Mac is floating around unused (even if the Mac is an unworking pile of junk in the corner). Unlike Windows, there is no license key or serial number attaching the software to the hardware. Indeed, if I own two Macs, I can download one copy of OSX and install it on each. It's the Mac hardware that provides the "license" to the software.

Clearly IANAL, so don't take my word as gospel here. But the fact remains that there are a number of Hackintosh community sites out there operating quite openly, developing software that automates this process trivially. One would assume that if it were license infringement in some manner, Apple would come down on them like a tonne of bricks. Of course, it's not a given that just because Apple don't take action that it's OK to do (they could well just not care enough to bother with the small fry).

These same sites do regularly have discussions about the legality of what they do, and so far nobody's been able to provide the legal mumbo jumbo that states point blank that it's any sort of copyright infringement. One would assume some bias, of course. However their logic and analysis of the various licenses and agreements are all pretty sound (to this non-lawyer, at least).

 

They're not that interested as far as I can tell. People wanting to spend money buy the real thing. People not wanting to spend money aren't going to spend money. There's no real loss.

Just don't go trying to build Hackintoshes to sell and undercut Apple... They don't like that.

 

Very different licensing system.

Microsoft's model is to sell software like physical items, as if they were "tables and chairs". Things to buy individually, with licenses per copy.

Apple's model is to sell hardware, with software as the enabling component. The licensing stipulates quite clearly that the hardware is the concerning item, and the software merely a thing that makes the hardware work.

You can install Mac OS X Server on VMWare. Although it gets weird now, because OS X Server is now simply "an app" (yes, I cringed too) that you install from the App Store. With the way the app store works on a "per login" basis, technically there's no way to stop someone logging in to a dozen Mac OS X VMWare installs and putting the "OS X Server App" on all of them to comply with the licensing.

As before, on the "Hackintosh" side, the legal mumbo jumbo seems to indicate that the software is legitimate as long as the hardware count matches. Technically speaking, any Mac, working or not, allows you one physical license and two virtual licenses (albeit running on the physical copy) of Mac OS X.

Again, none of this has been tested in any court of law anywhere in the world (at least from an end user point of view - tin posted the example where someone tried it commercially and got slapped), and I am not a lawyer. So the whole thing could be complete BS for all I know.