If you're the sort of Mac classicist who still goes to bed each night sobbing over the loss of the rainbow Apple logo, the dismantling of the Icon Garden, the retirement of the Happy Mac boot icon, and the de-emphasis of Clarus the Dogcow, you probably cried yourself a river a couple of months back when Apple officially announced the death of Mac OS 9-- by indicating that starting this January all new Macs will boot only into Mac OS X. Oh, sure, Mac OS 9 will live on in the Classic environment, but it's just not the same, you know? Sometimes you just want to boot into an operating system designed for mid-eighties-era hardware and paradigms, and not just run it as a protected process for access to ancient outdated applications like MacPaint, the original Dark Castle, and QuarkXPress 5.

Well, dry those tears, Buckaroo, because faithful viewer Daniel Dreibelbis tipped us off to an interesting reader comment over at MacInTouch. It seems one Kevin Cecil was on the horn with Apple tech support trying to iron out a problem he was having with Remote Desktop when the tech let slip that, despite Uncle Steve's seemingly ironclad "Mac OS X Only" edict, Apple does still plan to allow post-January Macs to boot into Mac OS 9 "for the foreseeable future"-- but only from a CD-ROM. This will allow the use of bootable Mac OS 9-based CDs for troubleshooting and repair purposes, while still forcing the Mac community to X-ify or die for all other purposes.

What this implies, of course, is that there's no massive architectural hardware shift planned for January that renders Mac OS 9 booting impossible to support; the Mac OS X-only transition is entirely an artificially-imposed measure on Apple's part intended to push its user base (and developers) into migrating to its new operating system instead of clinging to the old. For day-to-day use, of course, the upshot is the same; boot into Mac OS X or don't boot at all. But retaining Mac OS 9-booting compatibility only for CDs provides some nice options for utility developers while also giving Mac classicists the ability to boot back into the old neighborhood on occasion for the heady joy of experiencing cooperative multitasking and a truly medieval memory management system.

What this also means is that Apple's new Macs will inherently have the capability of booting from any volume into Mac OS 9, but Apple will cripple them via some sort of firmware goofiness. And as we've all seen with the iBook Extended Desktop hack, firmware-based cripplecode can occasionally be worked around. We won't be surprised if someone discovers a way to restore unrestricted Mac OS 9 booting on post-January Macs, thus attaining sainthood among that subset of the classic Mac-using community which refuses to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Who's up to the challenge?