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."

Odd.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So the realtek driver doesn't show up as an "airport" device; but as some other sort of connection. Does anybody know if this is just realtek being realtek(that is to say, painfully mediocre and not really adequate), or is "airportness" like CD-Burning support, something that is confined to Apple-shipping hardware by design?

As somebody mentioned, OSX's lower levels are largely open, at least enough to write drivers for; but that doesn't mean that the higher level polish stuff is. Anybody know?

Re:On the legal issue

[olddotter]

Which is probably as good as saying Realtek has no such agreement with Apple.

I don't think Apple will produce a traditional net book. Look for something like a larger iPhone/Ipod Touch or a 12" Mac Book Air (that is so light weight you can tie a string to it and use it for a kite).

Re:Odd.

[Gizzmonic]

I don't know, but some early revisions of the Linksys WMP54G were compatible with Macs, simply because the Linksys and Apple Airport card used the exact same reference design with no changes. They show up in the Airport menu as "third party" but work exactly like the built-in airport. Later revisions used a smaller version of the chipset though, and they weren't Mac compatible.

Re:What is a netbook?

[Hal_Porter]

A netbook should have the following characteristics:

1. Small (10" or less screen)
2. Long Battery Life (4 hrs +)
3. Light weight (under 2 kg)
4. Cheap (under $500 US).

Apple can do 1 and 2, and 3 but 4, I don't think so.

No, but they can convince people that netbooks are an unsustainable business model

http://theappleblog.com/2008/12/15/netbooks-the-race-to-the-bottom-has-begun/ [theappleblog.com]

Re:Nothing in the EULA

[code4fun]

One point about RealTek's driver, it looks like a plain Ethernet device from OS X. From what I understand, you need a special program to set the wireless settings. That is, you can't use existing wireless configuration. It also doesn't work as smoothly as Airport, either. What others have done on the MSI Wind is buy a wireless card off eBay that uses the same chipset Apple uses. This way, OS X sees it as an Airport device.

I'm more interested in Apple coming out with a netbook based on the ARM processor that will give me a day's worth of use instead of 4-5 hours on the current netbooks. In addition, I would like to be able to use the device as a tablet so I can jot things down and read PDF documents. Now, that's a netbook! Build it and I will buy.