So today was the WWDC keynote, where Apple usually unloads a bunch of new stuff. I’ve watched the past 3 WWDCs, via various liveblogs, and have to declare that today’s was by far the most boring. However, there was a small nugget of fun that most people seem to have overlooked. During the Snow Leopard show-and-tell, it was revealed that upon upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard, you should expect to see a whopping 6GB of internal storage freed up! That’s right, there’s currently 6GB of bloat hidden inside Leopard that will be trimmed off when you upgrade. Why is that good news?
It’s awesome news for the hackintosh community, specifically those hackintoshing netbooks. If you don’t know, ‘hackintosh’ is a term used for when people put Apple’s OS X operating system on non-Mac hardware, such as any of the currently available netbooks, or an old PC that you have lying around. It was made much easier when Apple began using Intel processors, and today, hackintoshing a netbook only takes a few extra steps, as opposed to installing the operating system on a bonafide Mac.
The only thing about netbooks is that often they have smaller hard drives – much smaller, down to 16GB in the case of the Dell Mini series. When I had OS X installed on my Dell Mini 9 with its 16GB SSD (solid-state drive), I only had 8GB free. Admittedly, it was a somewhat hacked up version of Leopard, and I certainly don’t expect Snow Leopard to only be a 2GB OS, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
Despite Apple’s insistence that they’re not working on a netbook, I have to think that maybe, just maybe, they’re slimming things down in preparation for one, perhaps next year? Of course, most people who want an Apple netbook would be perfectly happy with the iPhone OS running on a Dell Mini 9, for instance, but who knows what it’ll look like for real.
Ricky Cadden 