Boy howdy, it sure is interesting what sort of policy changes a little well-placed litigation can shake loose, isn't it? You're probably already familiar with the long-standing complaint among several Mac users that, despite the fact that their Macs (such as Bondi Blue iMacs, original iBooks, beige G3s, etc.) are on the official "supported hardware" list, the older ATI graphics chipsets found in those particular systems aren't fully supported in Mac OS X. Crazy optimists that we are, we always just figured that Apple simply hadn't yet gotten around to fixing that-- but in December, the company officially stated that further support for those chips was "not planned."

Well, as you can imagine, even if Apple never had any intention whatsoever of adding support for older ATI chipsets, admitting that fact in public was probably a mistake; we have this unshakeable mental image of Apple's entire legal department all saying "D'oh!" at once. With a fairly clear gulf between what was promised and what Apple admitted that it would (or would not) provide, it was only a matter of weeks before we heard about a class action lawsuit alleging that Apple had lured buyers with promises of certain technology it then decided not to deliver. And frankly, as much as we love Apple, it looked to us that for Apple to wriggle out of this snafu would be a litigational upset almost O.J.-esque in its range. Well, okay, maybe not that bad, but still, Apple's statement that further support for those chipsets "is not planned" looks like a smoking gun to us, and it's available right on Apple's own web site.

Or, at least, it was. Interestingly enough, according to an article at MacCentral, Apple has quietly changed that Knowledge Base article, which now states that "further support for the graphic accelerator chipsets listed above is being investigated for a future version of Mac OS X." So whaddaya think-- is this Apple seeing the light after facing a lawsuit it didn't think it stood much chance of winning, or is it just the company trying to get rid of the evidence to cover its butt? Frankly, we wouldn't necessarily put it past Steve and co. for engaging in a little creative revisionism, but we're just nutty enough to think that Apple really is reconsidering its position on older ATI support.

After all, if Apple was hoping that the plaintiffs would see the new page and just rub their eyes and say, "gee, we must have read that wrong the first time-- let's drop the case," the company's even more naïve than we are, and that's hardly likely. No, Apple's a business, and right now it's presumably weighing whether the costs to build better legacy graphics support into Mac OS X would outweigh the costs of fighting-- and quite possibly losing-- the lawsuit. We can hardly wait to hear what the decision turns out to be. May we hazard a guess that "upon further investigation," Apple will decide to support those chipsets after all? Fingers crossed, anyway.