That might make some sense as just a straight-up ergonomic design change, but the weirdest thing is that the center of the navigational circle is still a button, that does the same thing as the Play/Pause button.

Perhaps Apple is future-proofing the remote for some future product ?
[Read Apple’s New Remote Is A Riddle, Wrapped In A Mystery, Inside An Enigma]

The Fact is Apple publicly said that one of the goals of 10.6 was to reduce unnecessary code, and so removing unused CPU’s seems like fairly logical step in that process. But people, caught up in the cable news style of phoney outrage (that seems to be the in thing on the technology blogosphere at the moment,) would rather believe the conspiracy theory rather than the far simpler and more obvious answer. So I was relieved this morning when Ars Technica finally reported the story with a degree of rationality

From Ars Technica:

While conspiracy theorists might answer “yes”, it seems unlikely that Apple would target the subset of Hackintosh owners that are using Netbooks with Atom processors. When we asked our source, they said it was more likely that support was taken out during code optimization, particularly optimization for SSE4, which the Atom does not support.

[Read 10.6.2 kills most Netbook love - Ars Technica]
Some of the comments on forums about this are hilarious too. My favourite ones are from those arguing that Apple would loose customers because of this move, clearly not seeing the irony that what they were actually asking was for Apple to make it easier not to be an Apple customer.
The funny thing about this is, that hackers will probably get around this problem in a matter of days, so it’s not like the OS X hackintosh netbook community is going away any time soon. I can’t wait to see how the Angry Mac Bastards crew deal with this one.

In my opinion all of this (apart from the actual book) is nonsense. First of all there’s the name. The use of the letter “x” is standard practice when you don’t know the number you want to use or you don’t want to reveal that number. I’ve spoken to a few writers and they all confirm that this is standard practice. Then there’s the claim that the name change is to bring Aperture into “alignment” with OS X. This also makes no sense what so ever. Aperture has never existed as an OS 9  programme, and OS X has used the X in its name since it’s first version years ago. There’s nothing to align? It doesn’t make any sense. People are seeing two and two and coming up with 10. (or X) Quicktime was called Quicktime X because Apple were jumping it to version 10.0. Somehow I doubt that Aperture is going to jump from version 2 to 10.

Then there’s the date thing. Why would you fake the date but keep the far more revealing name intact? Like I said, it makes no sense. On top of all this Apple has come out and flatly stated that their “Holiday Lineup is Set” and that there will be no more major new releases this year, which pretty much throws water on the “by the end of november or the end of the year claim”. I bring all of this up because, as is typical in the mac web, lots of sites have jumped on this rumour and continue to spread it despite the evidence (and simple logic) to the contrary. I want to see a new version of Aperture as much as the next person, but I highly doubt we’re going to see it this year, and it almost certainly won’t be called Aperture X.

1. No matter what price it is released at it will be claimed that it is “too expensive” and that it will be “a miserable failure.”

2. Someone will compare it to the Cube warning of an imminent repeat of history.

3. Someone will compare its prospects to the original Mac and how it lost market share to Windows also warning of an imminent repeat of history.

4. Everyone will wonder why no one thought of it before.

5. Within six months competitors will be trying to copy it by attempting to shoehorn its one key feature into existing product lines.

6. The usual pundits will decry its lack of features and point out how some competing but never really successful product is actually much better.

7. A large percentage of die hard mac fans will claim that it is the best thing ever invented in the history of the world and will change the face of computing forever.

8. Apple will claim that it is the best thing ever invented in the history of the world and will change the face of computing forever.

9. An equally large percentage of mac fans will claim they hate it because it doesn’t include some obscure feature but will still buy it anyway.

10. The technology press will be obsessed with the product for at least 6 months after it is launched.