Apple has released what it calls “Performance Update 1.0,” an update to its Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard) operating systems for selected iMacs and MacBooks.

As Apple describes it — in typically brief fashion — in its Support pages, ”This update addresses intermittent hard drive related pauses reported by a small number of customers.”

Gotta love those detailed descriptions!

The update may be related to an EFI Firmware Update in June that some MacBook owners suspect was the cause of intermittent crashes and system freezes. This latest update may well put these problems to rest once and for all, except there’s something interesting about the name…that 1.0 suffix hints at the possibility of further revisions to come. A “Performance Update, Update” perhaps?

The update isn’t for everyone, however. It applies only to the following Mac models.

MacBook
MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008)
MacBook (13-inch, Early 2009)
MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2009)

MacBook Pro
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2008)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2009)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2009)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53GHz, Mid 2009)

MacBook Air
MacBook Air (Late 2008)
MacBook Air (Mid 2009)

Mac Mini
Mac Mini (Early 2009)

iMac
iMac (24-inch, Early 2009)
iMac (20-inch, Early 2009)
iMac (20-inch, Mid 2009)

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I wrote earlier about Mac clones and where Apple may draw the line. A recent example I gave of the sheer bravado of the cloners was the story of EFI-X USA selling a dongle with PCs as pseudo-Mac clones. The company that supplies the dongle did not approve of this, and I mentioned in my article how EFI-X USA admitted as much.

Well, today comes a report that the company making the dongle (Arts Studios Entertainment Media) has officially severed ties with EFI-X USA as their North America distributor. According to the article: 

The whole situation was triggered when EFI-X USA LLC (unrelated to ASEM as a company) started peddling generic PCs with pre-installed OS X and the EFI-X dongle. This upset ASEM which sought to block the American shop from selling machines. A falling out of sorts ensued and, as of the 12th of January, ASEM has come forward and denounced the EFIX USA business model as breaching its NDA and terms & conditions.

Good for them. As they had shown before, they see a difference between selling an item for a one-off Mac installation on PCs, and wholesale distribution of what are essentially Mac clones. As explained in my post, Apple has little history of going after one-off “Hackintoshes,” but are not likely to stand around while anything resembling a ready-made Mac is being sold to the public at large. 

Keep in mind that the dongle in question is still available. ASEM has simply picked a more, shall we say, ethical, distributor: 

ASEM has appointed a new EFI-X partner in the US. It’s named Express HD, a newly-founded hardware etailer that’ll take over selling ASEM’s EFI-X UEFI dongle.

Lest there be any doubt this was a case of ASEM knowing the difference between enabling a thing, and selling it ready-made as a “Mac,” comments from ASEM’s CEO should make it clear: 

Not peddling hardware pre-installed with OS X and not pitching itself as a competitor to Apple is what sets the EFI-X apart from the likes of Psystar and other clone makers, says [ASEM CEO David] Rutigliano.

Exactly. 

Obviously, I don’t know what Apple’s future intentions are regarding the practice of bypassing the Mac OS X EULA and installing it on non-Apple hardware. Maybe at some point they’ll decide ASEM’s dongle makes it a little too easy, and try to shut it down as well. But I tend to think they won’t, certainly not anytime soon, and will continue to focus their efforts on the Psystars of the world.

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Since I heard that the MacBook Air didn’t come with an onboard optical drive, but did come, instead, with this magic virtual disk feature, I’ve been having a very interesting wonder – does this also mean that NetBoot now works – at least for the Air – over wireless?

And, fresh off the show floor today hot from MacFixIt, is confirmation that this is in fact true. On these machines, at least, NetBoot will work over a wireless network.

Before I start talking about the implications of this, some quick background on NetBoot, especially for those who’ve never used this. NetBoot is a nifty little tool that lets you create an image of your boot disc, and then mount it remotely on client machines to install it. This requires four things to work: a Mac running some flavor of OS X Server and three processes – NetBoot, afp, and DHCP, a separate network-compatibly Mac, a network cable, and a bit of patience. (The cable is now evidently superfluous.)

Drop the install DVD into the Server machine, fire up Image Utility, and create your NetBoot image. (This is cake; like many Apple utilities, it fairly well walks you through using it.) Set up your server to host the image, and you’re done with it. Now go to the client machine. Hold down N during boot to cause the client to look for network images, and you’re good to go.

Because of the need for Server, and because creating an image and installing it takes longer than simply installing it on the client machine directly, you mostly see multi-machine administrator types doing this. The really nifty thing about NetBoot is, in creating this image, you can customize the settings in your image – and then allow access to this install disk to all the machines you want to use it.

Network capable machines can also run as normal off these disks; and you can also set your client machines to always preferentially boot from the NetBoot server, so that every time they reboot, they use the same clean image. (This is very useful in the context of large public or semi-public groups of computers – think campus computer labs – where you’d rather users not be meddling with settings.) Each individual copy of Server can manage up to 25 different NetBoot images, so you could even theoretically install specific setups on groups of machines. I’ve also seen it used to install Tiger from DVD’s on non-DV-bearing computers.

So that’s NetBoot. Provided your NetBoot image host doesn’t go splort – and believe me, if you have machines booting every day over the network, you live in terror of that – it’s a very, very shiny little trick. But back to the MacBook Air, and doing it wirelessly.

Remote Disc evidently contains a NetBoot server, which is in itself interesting. But even more so is that it can be done wirelessly, which must have involved some major changes to EFI, especially in regards to how EFI handles wireless networks. Scuttlebutt is that this will even work on secured wireless networks. That is really interesting. (Working enterprise Mac support has taught me that if there is one thing you can’t depend on with Intel Macs, it’s their ability to find or connect to a given wireless network, especially an exncrypted one.)

Smoothing those issues out would help all of us – maybe there’s another EFI update in the works for Intel Macs?

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