Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
So, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was running on PCs even before Leopard's official launch to the public. After only a few days, the process has been streamlined and simplified, with the community helping each other out to find ways of getting Leopard to run smoothly on all kinds of different hardware configurations.
Whether Apple wants users to figure out how to get OS X 10.5 running on just about any relatively modern PC configuration out there or not, users are doing it, in droves.
Now that Leopard 10.5 has been hacked, surely 10.5.1 and the rest will all eventually be hacked too, even if Apple re-locks it to only work with authorized hardware?
The cat and mouse game that is iPhone hacking, Apple TV hacking, iPod hacking, iPod Touch hacking and even the hacking of Intel Macs to run Windows before Apple very quickly thereafter introduced Boot Camp to the world as a beta is a game with seemingly no end.
Locks can always be picked, locked software can always be hacked. If there’s a will, there’s a way, and hackers often do it just for the challenge, and naturally some do it for the fame.
Apple’s tight controls over their hardware and software platforms have never been under greater attack, giving Apple less control over their most modern platforms than they’ve ever had before.
Apple’s magic sauce has been splattered everywhere with all this hacking, with dedicated users and Apple fans the cause of Apple’s hacking troubles. Apple might want to get it all back in the bottle, but just as with Pandora and her box, the reality is that we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Just as the world breathlessly awaited new Apple products like Macs, iPods and the iPhone, every Apple response to hack attacks to lock things down to the way Apple wants them to be just ups the ante that little bit more.
Is this all somehow part of Steve Jobs’ master plan? If so, it’s working brilliantly so far, with Apple’s star never shining brighter. Who knows if hell will freeze over again? It did the first time with iTunes. It did when Intel Macs natively ran Windows. It did when PCs got Safari. It did when the iPhone officially received Jobs’ third party software blessing.
Could hell freeze over again with a future version of OS X 10.5 being officially made available for the generic PC platform? Sure, it’d seriously affect Apple’s hardware sales. But with Steve Jobs, anything is possible. It probably won’t happen soon (if ever, officially), but whatever Steve’s ultimate plan is for us all, one thing’s for sure: what a ride it’s been so far, and it’s really only just the beginning!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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