Mac OS X 10.6.2 arrived recently, and it doesn’t support the Atom processor. This has led to people crying foul, saying Apple’s out to kill the hackintosh community. One blog claims, commenting on the system causing instant reboots for affected hardware, “My sources tell me that everytime a netbook user installs 10.6.2 an Apple employee gets their wings”. Shane Spiess is then quoted in an article by Kevin McLaughlin for ChannelWeb: “There is no other logical reason why Apple would do this unless they’re going to enter this space with some sort of tablet-type device” (hat-tip: Daring Fireball).

I suspect the reason is simpler. If you count the number of products Apple has in its line that use the Atom processor, you’ll come up with the figure of zero. Nada. Zip. Why should Apple spend time supporting a processor that’s not used in its products? Chances are Apple’s been optimising and bug-cleaning, and broke something that it can’t be bothered to fix—because it doesn’t need to. And even if the action was ‘malicious’ as the earlier linked blog claims, it’s worth noting that Apple is a hardware company and makes a huge chunk of its profits from Macs. If Apple doubled its marketshare but in doing so lost most of its sales to Atom-based netbooks, it’d be screwed. But as Apple’s Q4 results show, the company’s in fine form and doesn’t have anything to fear from hackintoshes, which more points to the likelihood that it just doesn’t care.

“Oh noes!” shrieked the internet, “The Apple iPhone finally has a virus!” Well, a worm, according to the BBC. Well, a worm if you’ve jailbroken your device (against Apple’s recommendation). Oh, and if you’ve also installed SSH.

Clearly, Apple should immediately leap to support people who’ve installed unsupported software on a device that they’ve jailbroken, thereby making it unsupported twice over! Alternatively, it’d be nice if journos would make it clearer that this exploit isn’t down to inherent failures in Apple’s device, but down to people doing stuff with it that the built-in software’s not designed to deal with.