Realtek's Wireless Driver Drives Thoughts of an Apple Netbook

Slatterz writes "With Macworld 2009 mere weeks away, one rumour that seemingly won't die is the idea of a Mac OS X Netbook PC. Asking a company to provide OS X drivers for their netbooks has, up until now, been met with silence, and probably a little quaking on the vendor side as they wait for the heavy footsteps of Apple's army of lawyers. It seems, however, that Realtek, who provide the WiFi chip found in the MSI Wind U100, are dipping their toes into the legally iffy world of the Hackintosh. Forum users at MSIWind.Net asked politely for drivers, and after a lot of patience, Beta drivers were provided."

Nothing in the EULA

[actionbastard]

There is nothing in the Apple EULA that prevents anyone from creating a driver for their hardware to work with OS X. The fact that RealTek does not make -or may never make- hardware for Macs is immaterial.

darwin

[leuk_he]

Doesn't OSX run on Darwin [wikipedia.org], An open source bsd based OS? Why would you not be allowed to create drivers for darwin?

On the legal issue

[Spad]

While everyone is asking why this would be a legal problem, I can only assume that the writers of these articles are taking the view that if Realtek have produced these drivers as part of some future OSX-based netbook then they would probably be protected by some kind of NDA with Apple. Obviously if this rather unlikely scenario is assumed correct then Realtek would potentially be breeching said hypothetical NDA by providing the beta drivers to members of the public.

Or something like that anyway.

PCI Cards et al.

[Midnight Thunder]

While this effort might be targeted at the MSI Wind, the work performed should allow any device that use the chipset to work with MacOS X. Think of PCI cards for MacPros, or USB sticks allowing older Macs to get 802.11N support.

OMG someone is writing drivers for Mac OS X?!

[Henriok]

OMG OMG OMG! Some company is actually writing drivers for Mac OS X! That's about bloody time! Everyone is wining on Apple to write drives for every thinkable gadget out there when it should be pretty obvious to ask the manufacturer of that gadget to do just that. Is this so hard?! It's not Apple's fault nor responsibility that MP3 player X doesn't integrate with iTunes, or cell phone Y with iSync, or video card Z.. or.. or..

Re:Nothing in the EULA

[nacturation]

I think the bigger thing that component manufacturers are worried about is that Steve Jobs will call up MSI and say "Hey, we'd like to contract with you to develop a Mac netbook based on the Wind to run OS X. Oh, and by the way... don't use any RealTek chips in it."

Re:Nothing in the EULA

[yttrstein]

And not only that, but this is one of the reasons that Darwin was open sourced in the first place. My company has done the odd bit of consulting here and there with other entities that provide all sorts of weird hardware drivers for OS X, and they don't call Apple and ask them for one first.

Because they don't have to. That's part of what Darwin is for. This is FUD, and should be treated as such.

Re:Netbooks aren't small computers, they're large

[Hal_Porter]

I saw someone make a comment, and I don't remember who or where, but I think it's insightful. Netbooks should be thought of more as larger, more capable PDA's/Smartphones, than they should as smaller, less capable computers. Given that premise, it would make sense to use a modified version of Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch OS with slightly expanded capabilities, instead of trying to get a stripped down Mac OS X to work well on a netbook.

I think Apple might find they *could* build a winning Netbook if they took that approach. Maybe they already are. Apple likes to deny they are doing something right up until they announce at WWDC.

That's not true. As one of the comments on the Apple Blog put it

wait a minute... on an iphone, can i...

view flash-based websites? nope
edit word docs? nope ...edit any docs? nope
copy/paste? nope
multi task? nope
install any application i want? nope
change my background? nope
delete all the icons on my desktop? nope
instant message across different networks? (even messaging on single networks suck) nope
video chat? nope
connect to bluetooth devices? nope
replace the battery? nope

You must be retarded if you think itâ(TM)s possible to do the same things on an iphone than on a netbook. I have an iphone, and while itâ(TM)s an excellent smart phone (despite its flaws), Iâ(TM)d shoot myself the day I had to rely on it as a computer. You must also think Iâ(TM)m stupid if you think I consider your post to be a legitimate response instead of a failed attempt at defending the un-defendable.

See that's the problem. An x86 PC with a desktop OS is a hell of a lot more flexible than a typical PDA or Smartphone.

Though I suppose Apple being Apple they could take an iPhone, take out the baseband ASIC and the crippling lockdown, add a larger screen and keyboard and sell it cheaper than the cheapest MacBook and their fanbase will say it is the best thing since sliced bread.

And since it's ARM based rather than x86 it won't run desktop applications and thus won't compete with the Macbook Air.

Re:Odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless Apple changed it in Leopard, the Airport interfaces are SPI, not public API. That essentially means that nobody other than Apple can produce drivers that even link against those parts of the I/O Kit. So no, this has nothing to do with any agreement and everything to do with why every third-party wireless device has to have its own configuration tools.....

Re:Nothing in the EULA

[uglyduckling]

Sorry, are you really claiming here that Apple left the firewire port out for the sake of aesthetics and/or to protect us from the tyranny of a four-pin port?! It was left out as a profit-maximising measure because they know that the MacBook is incredibly popular with musicians and they want to force people who rely on FireWire (i.e. anyone who wants to get multi-channel audio into a laptop at a decent sample/bitrate) into buying the MacBook Pro. Simple as that.