Why Apple can't disable OS 9 booting completely

**Snowball** · December 14th, 2002, 05:11 PM

Here's a common hypothetical situation:
Say I just bought a new PowerMac G4 1.4 GHz, released 1 month after this upcoming MWSF (I said hypothetical

). Like Apple said, it can't boot OS 9 natively. I buy it with a 30 GB hard drive, but want to use an 80 GB drive I had from before. I format the HD on my old PowerMac, install it into the new PowerMac, boot the new PowerMac from the Jaguar CD, and install Jaguar onto the 80 GB HD - OK so far, right?
Here's the problem: let's say I have to use Quark 5 or some other OS 9-only program in Classic. (Many users will have to do this.) I'm stuck! I can't boot from an OS 9 CD to install Classic and I can't install 9 while booted in X because the installer needs Classic to run. The only way to get around this is install OS 9 on another Mac and copy it over to the new PowerMac (a pretty lousy "solution" if you ask me).
This leaves Apple with two choices, one ugly, one not quite so ugly: they have to either carbonize a new OS 9 installer that you download and install Classic with (ugly), or they allow CD booting of OS 9 (not so ugly). I bet they go for the CD boot option, which could prove to be very interesting. If they allowed 1/2 way OS 9 booting like that, I bet it would be much easier for OpenFirmware hackers to allow HD booting (hey, they enabled the monitor spanning in the iBook/iMac!).

P.S. MacOS Rumors seems to agree:
"Apple still plans to set January as the advent of the first Macs to be unable to boot Mac OS 9 (except from an Emergency CD)..."

**toast** · December 14th, 2002, 05:34 PM

I can't think of my Mac without OS9. I would understand the "OSX boot-only" argument if OSX was OSXI.

How can you release a OSX-boot-only computer when 80% of the printing industry uses Macs and when Quark Inc. has not released Quark 6 OSX ?

I'm stunned.

**jarinteractive** · December 14th, 2002, 06:29 PM

"How can you release a OSX-boot-only computer when 80% of the printing industry uses Macs and when Quark Inc. has not released Quark 6 OSX ?"

Apple stated a few days ago that they will continue to sell some PowerMacs (the dual 1.25GHz), as well as eMacs that will be able to boot into OS 9 until June 2003. By that time, Quark is supposed to be released for Mac OS X.

Apple will probably include Classic as a part of the Mac OS X installer that is included with new computers.

-JARinteractive

**RacerX** · December 14th, 2002, 07:20 PM

Originally posted by jarinteractive
"How can you release a OSX-boot-only computer when 80% of the printing industry uses Macs and when Quark Inc. has not released Quark 6 OSX ?"

First, I think it should be noted that the printing industry didn't start out using QuarkXPress, so there is no real reason that it has to continue. At one point 100% of desktop publishing was done with Aldus PageMaker. Later FrameMaker and QuarkXPress entered the picture. After a few years QuarkXPress had made some strong headway in the business and Adobe felt they needed a page layout program of their own... so they went shopping. Adobe bought FrameMaker and Aldus PageMaker thinking that they had in one step captured the market (PageMaker + FrameMaker made up the majority the layout programs in use at the time). What ended up happening was quite a surprise, QuarkXPress advanced while PageMaker and FrameMaker didn't. What was worse was that one of the best aspects of QuarkXPress was an idea that Adobe had started with it's own products... plug-ins. In the years that followed PageMaker (bought at version 5) didn't change much through version 6.5 (or even 7 as I understand it). QuarkXPress took over the market slowly increasing the cost of their program as competition fell.

The fact is that though many haven't been around long enough to see it happen, things can change. The way people are talking about QuarkXPress now is not any different from what they were saying about PageMaker some ten years ago.

Second, I haven't (and can't) boot my PowerBook from Mac OS 9 off my hard drive. I didn't install the Mac OS 9 drivers when I reformatted it (from it's original UFS format use when Rhapsody was on it). Classic on that system was installed by using a disk image of a universal install of Mac OS 9.2.1 placed in a folder called Classic in my Applications folder. From there I was able to install Acrobat 4, Photoshop 6, Illustrator 8, GoLive 5, and PageMill 3 (later upgrading Acrobat to 5 and Photoshop to 7). At no point did I boot this system into Mac OS 9 or the like. It went straight from Rhapsody 5.6 to Mac OS X v10.2.

I really don't see not being able to boot a system in Mac OS 9 as a problem, it sure hasn't been for me.

**MisterMe** · December 14th, 2002, 07:20 PM

Originally posted by Snowball
Here's a common hypothetical situation:
Say I just bought a new PowerMac G4 1.4 GHz, released 1 month after this upcoming MWSF (I said hypothetical). Like Apple said, it can't boot OS 9 natively. I buy it with a 30 GB hard drive, but want to use an 80 GB drive I had from before. I format the HD on my old PowerMac, install it into the new PowerMac, boot the new PowerMac from the Jaguar CD, and install Jaguar onto the 80 GB HD - OK so far, right?

....

P.S. MacOS Rumors seems to agree:
"Apple still plans to set January as the advent of the first Macs to be unable to boot Mac OS 9 (except from an Emergency CD)..."

All Macintosh models shipping today have MacOS 9 installed. After January 1, 2003, all Macintosh models will continue to ship with MacOS 9 installed. The only difference is that those that were introduced prior to January 1 will be bootable using MacOS 9. Those introduced after January 1 will not, but Classic should work fine.

For all the publicity given Apple's most recent announcement concerning its educational partners and Quark's announcement to its customers, these announcements are clarifications rather than news. To infer otherwise, you would have to believe that Apple has returned a squad of engineers to development of MacOS 9 for new models that will be obsolete in June. That makes no sense and it is not happening.

**toast** · December 14th, 2002, 08:03 PM

Originally posted by RacerX
First, I think it should be noted that the printing industry didn't start out using QuarkXPress (…)

Second, I haven't (and can't) boot my PowerBook from Mac OS 9 off my hard drive. I didn't install the Mac OS 9 drivers when I reformatted it (from it's original UFS format use when Rhapsody was on it). Classic on that system was installed by using a disk image of a universal install of Mac OS 9.2.1 placed in a folder called Classic in my Applications folder. From there I was able to install Acrobat 4, Photoshop 6, Illustrator 8, GoLive 5, and PageMill 3 (later upgrading Acrobat to 5 and Photoshop to 7). At no point did I boot this system into Mac OS 9 or the like. It went straight from Rhapsody 5.6 to Mac OS X v10.2.

I really don't see not being able to boot a system in Mac OS 9 as a problem, it sure hasn't been for me.

1) The quote you give is not jarinteractive's

2) How old are you ? It seems I'm twice younger (at least) ! I'm 19

3) Your jump from Rhap to OSX is unusual. Most people are jumping from OS9.22 to OSX.22 today. For those no more OS9-booting could represent some problems - loss of time, loss of OS9 settings, for instance.

I love Quark ! Anyway

**fryke** · December 14th, 2002, 08:03 PM

Apple is also likely to make changes to Classic that will make it an OS X installable pkg rather than an OS installer. Also, those new Macs will come with restore-CDs that contain the Classic environment, so installing a new harddrive isn't a problem, really. Just restore the system from the restore CDs and you're fine.

Btw. Apple promised to continue to sell 1.25 GHz Dual PowerMacs that can boot OS 9, so you won't be able to get the higher end models (to be released after MWSF) booting into OS 9.

I personally hoped Apple would be clear to boot OS 9 off our harddrives earlier in the process, so we could move on. It happened for me, but that's because of my choice of software (and our company's, but I'm IT head there, so...). If we were XPress users back in 2001, I'm sure we'd have found a way to go InDesign by now. I'm also sure Adobe would have been quite helpful in the task.

**RacerX** · December 14th, 2002, 08:32 PM

pointed out by toast
1) The quote you give is not jarinteractive's

That what I get for using that quote button and not proof reading.

asked by toast
2) How old are you ? It seems I'm twice younger (at least) ! I'm 19

Four years ago I was twice as old as you.

Now it seems like with each passing day I become a year older!

3) Your jump from Rhap to OSX is unusual. Most people are jumping from OS9.22 to OSX.22 today. For those no more OS9-booting could represent some problems - loss of time, loss of OS9 settings, for instance.

Yeah, I'm weird that way. I do have a system that boots both 9.2.1 and 10.2.2, but it didn't seem to go with the thread (or the point I wanted to make).

I love Quark ! Anyway

So do most of my clients. But then again, at one time no one could even think of using anything else but PageMaker. It was the dream app of it's time (I still use 5.0a today for personal things), but things are always changing. Hopefully this is going to push the price down on QuarkXPress though. When one app has as much power in the industry as QuarkXPress does, they can ask what ever they want. With competition comes price wars! We all win then.