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Very surprised, no Apple motherboard suppliers ?


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you said : "Lots of motherboards have EFI and TPM chips."

Do you have some example ?

 

Intel currently offers PC motherboards supporting EFI. All boards that use the Intel

945 chipset series support EFI. However, no vendor except Apple, Inc. has yet

taken advantage of this. A firmware update could enable EFI on these

motherboards, but no such update has yet been released, most likely because

there is no EFI-capable 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows.

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Intel currently offers PC motherboards supporting EFI. All boards that use the Intel

945 chipset series support EFI. However, no vendor except Apple, Inc. has yet

taken advantage of this. A firmware update could enable EFI on these

motherboards, but no such update has yet been released, most likely because

there is no EFI-capable 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows.

 

 

Because Windows is the only OS available.... Whereever you got that quote it is wrong. Mac OS is neither the first or the only OS to support EFI instead of Bios.

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Itaniums have used EFI since 2000, as has the IA64 version of Windows, and indeed any IA64 OS. Technically EFI is a type of firmware, not a physical interface. ALL Intel boards with the i945 chipset and presumably newer boards have EFI-compatible firmware. All it would take is a firmware update to remove the BIOS-16 code from the firmware and replace with EFI. When Microsoft releases the EFI patch for Vista we'll see that board developers taking advantage of this. But as we've said, the major roadblock of Apple OEM vs. retail motherboards is the TPM protection. Mac OS X boots on non-EFI systems no problem- it's the TPM chip that's the issue. And the TPM chips on retail boards don't include the same "keys" that Apple's boards have therefore booting a non-modified copy of OS X is not possible on non-Apple hardware.

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I don't think there's a point in knowing exactly which board it is. The KEY issue here - it was mentioned but left at that - is in fact industrial sub-contracting. A contract between a sub-contractor (Intel) and a contractee (Apple) usually contain clauses that stipulate exclusivity, meaning the sub-contractor will manufacture the product for his contractee exclusively which contractually excludes Intel the right to sell the exact same product to anybody else.

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  • 1 year later...

Okay, I realize that building a Mac motherboard into a PC case defeats the purpose...

 

AND

 

Buying a Mac motherboard by itself pretty much wouldn't be possible unless you bought one out of a gutted Mac on eBay...

 

BUT

 

How about desoldering the TPM off a dead Intel Mac and perhaps adding it to a USB thumb drive (that's had its memory removed) or something like that?

Would that be possible?

Are there any other ways (theoretically) to spoof the TPM using a modified or unmodified thumb drive?

 

Just curious.

 

And to stay within the boundaries of the law and the rules on the forums, keep it strictly theoretical, no instructions, please.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Well all I know that Psystar.com has discovered their hardware and they are using it brilliantly to their business. They are making their own system and installing mac osx clean without any hacks, even they claim that you can just install osx otb. That's amazing how they found out exact specifications that works!! Must be some apple staff behind it :P

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Well all I know that Psystar.com has discovered their hardware and they are using it brilliantly to their business. They are making their own system and installing mac osx clean without any hacks, even they claim that you can just install osx otb. That's amazing how they found out exact specifications that works!! Must be some apple staff behind it :P

 

That's ridiculous. The Psystar machines are just hackintoshes, not even particularly good ones. They are built to be cheap to build for maximum profit, not for maximum compatibility or performance.

 

How about desoldering the TPM off a dead Intel Mac and perhaps adding it to a USB thumb drive (that's had its memory removed) or something like that?

Would that be possible?

Are there any other ways (theoretically) to spoof the TPM using a modified or unmodified thumb drive?

 

The TPM is not an issue, it's a pointless excercise.

 

 

This topic is from march 2007, please don't resurrect ancient topics like this.

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