Mac Cloner Psystar Ships First Service Pack 468
Preedit writes "Not only is Mac clone maker Psystar continuing to defy Apple's ban on third-party Leopard installations, it's supporting the hardware with updates. Psystar Mac clones shipped as of Monday will include a 'service pack' that features fixes for a range of problems, some of them inherent in Apple's own software, according to InformationWeek. The fixes address a range of troubles, from glitches in Apple's Time Machine backup feature to quirks in the Keyboard Viewer and Character Palette entries in Leopard's system preferences menu. There's also support for the latest version of Java and other updates. According to the story, by offering a full menu of support, Psystar appears to be daring Apple to attempt to enforce provisions in the Leopard license agreement that forbid third-party installations and sales." We've been discussing Psystar clones for a while.
Good (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
Encrypted binaries fit in there, especially since the key is sitting in the SMC chip, which only real macs have.
Eventually breaking those restrictions, whatever they may be in the future if anything, may run afoul of the DMCA, in which case it is no longer a license issue. Somewhat like breaking DRM to use music on the device of your choice, this would be breaking locks on the OS to use it on the hardware of your choice, and both would technically violate the DMCA...right?
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These guys have balls (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe they're eunichs (sp?) and steve can't cut off their balls.
Re:These guys have balls (Score:5, Insightful)
... medium size ones..? (Score:4, Interesting)
Andy
Re:These guys have balls (Score:5, Funny)
Re:These guys have balls (Score:5, Funny)
I was impressed by his poker face, honestly. I think he thought he'd been exposing his boy to the decidedly wrong people.
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Re:These guys have balls (Score:5, Informative)
from: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:yZd3DfSTe6cJ:www.engadget.com/2008/04/15/psystar-says-rumors-of-its-demise-are-greatly-exaggerated-still/comments/11642842/+leopard+eula+unenforceable&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us [64.233.169.104]
Psystar/Open Computing is reselling a full (read: fully-licesned) copy of MacOSX Leopard. They are then preinstalling it onto the system, telling you that they do modifications, and telling you that the copy is no longer under warranty. In addition, the courts have been moving in the direction of saying EULA's are not necessarily contractual, because of the low barrier of people to click "I Accept", weakening any potential Apple case.
To be fair, DMCA is vague on modifying software for personal use, and violating license, but only from the perspective of "taking away revenue". In this case, Apple is getting attributed as creating the software, and sells a retail copy of Leopard every time Psystar/Open Computing sells one to buyers.
from: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:dIo9yM9-QvMJ:timmorton.blogspot.com/2008/04/apple-vs-psystar-clone-mac-era.html+leopard+eula+unenforceable&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us [64.233.169.104]
What it boils down to is that running Leopard on a machine that Apple did not make violates the EULA. EULA's are largely NOT legally enforceable, and in those states where they are the degree to which they are varies widely. EULA's are not active contracts, and are largely invalid because you cannot read them in entirety (or at all usually) on the packaging before making your purchase, leaving you vulnerable to stipulations that were unknown at the time of purchase. EULA's are legally weak, all but entirely unenforceable, and would be outrageously expensive to attempt to enforce on any type of broad scale.
Basically I think Apple really would have to pay to play this game that it might lose. EULA's are largely flawed and usually unenforceable. Will be interesting to see what Apple does, if not nothing.
Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Psystar system has a single Core 2 Duo CPU.
They don't say what the "similar, Apple-branded computer" is, but if it's a Mac Pro it's got two four-core CPUs.
The problem is that Apple doesn't make a similar computer. If they did, Psystar wouldn't have a market. And Apple would have a bigger one.
Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices... (Score:5, Insightful)
What they would have to worry about is cannibalising the iMac sales, because a standard-tower Mac plus a third party monitor, graphics card & RAM would be cheaper than an iMac and superior in every way except form-factor, which isn't really high on most people's list for a desktop.
No it wouldn't. The mythical mini-tower Mac, if it were ever made, would be priced at a little less than equivalent iMacs (if not exactly the same).
The real threat from such a box would be to Mac Pro sales.
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Would I have paid 200 UK pounds more for a mini tower where I can easily replace the HD, RAM and optical drive? Totally. There's an easy way that Apple can keep the Mac Pro market: limit the number of PCI/PCIe slots on the Mini Tower to ma
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$1000 and up markets (Score:3, Informative)
Which is exactly where they don't want to be. Right now they're huge in the $1000 and up market, which I'm sure is where they're happy to be.
Yea, you could almost say Apple owns the market above $1000: "Apple dominates sales for PCs above $1,000" [techspot.com].
FalconRe: (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's see; no c&d from Apple Legal, Apple gets their cut for the OS, Apple looks like the good guy by letting someone "stick it to the man", This isn't hurting their margins.
Where's the downside for Steve? Maybe this is Apple's way of testing the waters?
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iTunes sells iPods. Period. The app itself doesn't do much other than manage music and video to put on devices, mostly the iPod, but also random other 3rd party players in the OS X version. The store has no purpose whatsoever but to provide content for the hardware they sell, which in turn helps sell more of it.
OS X isn't even close to being "just BSD", the windowing system is a complete replacement, the toolkits are 100% in house develo
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Dell has fingerprint reader, white LED screen, bigger hard drive, with option for SSD, better remote which isn't £15 extra, options for faster processors up to 2.6ghz, integrated mobile broadband option, card reader, more speaker jacks, array microphones, metal finishes and a larger keyboard.
Macbook has S-video/composite out.
Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, because I can't get the video card I want put in.
BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE DON'T GIVE A SHIT. Geeks need to get that through their obstinate skulls. The vast majority of th
Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, "perfectly normal" people tend to just want to turn it on, pound out a couple pages in Word or fire off a few emails, and be done with things. TV, not so much, and blu-ray far less so (just spend the money on a PS3 and get blu-ray and gaming done in one). I'll give you the USB ports - it's a major source of irritation on my MBP (TWO on a pro machine? Yeah friggen right), and would be even more of one on an iMac that needs a keyboard and mouse plugged in. PC gamers that want Macs is a relatively small market, but except for the even smaller subset of overclockers who tend to truly be performance-on-a-budget-obsessed (I've been there), the Mac Pro isn't insanely out of reach given the specs it has. My aging PC desktop has a good $500 invested in the cooling alone (German watercooling) and another $250 in the case, and the other hardware probably cost me a good two grand at the time. Of course a lot of it was upgrade piece-by-piece which isn't really an option with the Mac Pro, but that's just not the "Apple Experience" nor will they ever allow that to be the case. Bad for you and me maybe, but we're a very small minority - even if we whine the most.
What I can say with a reasonable amount of happiness is that this kind of focus, even if it ignores what I want, is that it allows them to make what they have the best it can be. I know, RDF alert!, but I've yet to find a case modder or other enthusiast engineer something as sleek as the iMac.
Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you go with Firewire, it also has no net impact on the number of ports.
The easy fix? A USB hub. You're complaining about one of the very reasons USB was designed the way it was: to reduce clutter and the number of ports in a machine. It's also part of the iMac's design: most people have exactly two cords to deal with on their desk: power and the keyboard-mouse chain (which, unlike desktops, is one continuous cord rather than two separate ones back to the computer).
Most people don't want to open the case, don't want to buy cards, and don't really care. They'll order the computer with the feature if they want it, or they'll drag it to Best Buy and have them upgrade it, or they'll find that computer-savvy niece or nephew to fix "that clicking noise".
External upgrades are ones that people can actually just do themselves. Plug it in and go, for the most part. When you don't want it anymore, you can just unplug it and put it in a closet. No disassembly required. If you want to hide all the peripherals in that space in the desk where the tower is supposed to go, it's a simple task, and it'll hold more than a typical desktop could.
Really, regular people prefer the flexibility of external devices. If the computer never got opened, that would be fine by them. Cards and screwdrivers are for IT people and geeks. That's it.
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Yes, because I can't get the video card I want put in.
Thanks for completely missing the point. Most people don't care about advanced video card options.
And plays their games, and works with their PCI video capture card, and has enough USB ports for all their toys, and space for a 2nd hard drive to hold all their stuff.
Most people don't play demanding games, most people don't use video capture beyond Firewire on a digital camera and wouldn't know how to install a PCI card in the first place (and you can get USB/Firewire video capture devices), USB hubs are cheap and plentiful, and second hard drives can be hooked up via USB/Firewire. Do you even think about these idiotic arguments before you type them? Newsflash: Most p
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None of the other possibilities I can think of cost more than $2000.
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I already have a 23" LCD and a 21" CRT and "teh sexy" has negative value to me.
now you can get almost anything that used to be an internal component on USB.
The overhead of USB is significantly more than IDE or SATA, and even firewire reduces the performance advantage of the external drive my Mac mini boots from.
I'm glad to see competition, this isn't the cheap good upgradeable Mac that we've been waiting for though.
No, it's not.
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Even with a single processor, it's a $2299 machine.
That this thing fills a niche between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro that's more upgradeable than an iMac is pretty much the point.
It's a niche I'd like to scratch, sure... (Score:2)
Oh, I agree, I want something in that slot too. I was just objecting to the way they mplied that this was really an equivalent machine to the Mac Pro.
PS: When I went to the Apple Store I didn't see a single-CPU option for the Mac Pro. Is that hidden down beneath the configuration link?
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Oh, I agree, I want something in that slot too. I was just objecting to the way they mplied that this was really an equivalent machine to the Mac Pro.
But they never made any such implication. You invented that up all on your own. All they said was:
The system is priced at $804.99. A similar, Apple-branded computer could cost more than $2,000.
No one in their right mind is going to claim that a dual core system is "similar" to the 8 core Mac Pro. You're just harping on this non-point in order to be contrary.
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That's the point. Apple has always been about the boutique high end. They want nothing to do with a commodity product which is what the Psystar aims to be. Apple doesn't want to fight for scraps because they would go bankrupt with such a relatively small base. They do need to defend their exclusivity or some of the faithful might wander which is why they will eventually respond.
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And Apple would have a bigger one.
Not necessarily. Apple concentrate on small-form-factor, mid/high-end laptops and workstation-class towers for good reasons: high margins, longer product cycles and more emphasis on style. Since the Intel switch, Macs have been reasonably competitive provided you compare like-for-like (i.e. SFF with SFF; high-end laptop with high-end laptop; Xeon workstation with Xeon workstation). The "Apple premium" is pretty much the same as what other manufacturers charge for their "executive" range over their "budge
Once Again... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Bet ten to one (Score:5, Funny)
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My guess is that they will wait until the company dies. Then, if, for some reason, it fails to die, they'll sue 'em--and win, of course. Clearly, Apple has this one--this is a blatent knowing violation of the EULA by a for-profit corporation.
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Re:Bet ten to one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bet ten to one (Score:5, Funny)
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Slow News Day? (Score:3, Interesting)
From TFA:
To me it seems more like daring suckers to send their credit-card information to a fairly shady operation. As in the last slashdot article on Psystar, has anyone besides a few high-profile writers with 'protoypes' actually seen a Psystar -- in the wild, so to speak? InfoWeek cribbed a breif website notice and apparently created a whole 'article piece' based on it
Anway... Instead of becoming a noble defender of user's EULA rights, it seems far more likely they'll take the submitted order money and disappear into the night.
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Re:Slow News Day? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dell doesn't sell a Mini competitor, and Apple doesn't sell a headless low or mid-end desktop tower, so those products were impossible to compare.
Apple's MacBook line, iMac line, and Pro line are all very comparable - even cheaper right after a refresh - to their Dell counterparts.
Go try it
Re:Slow News Day? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Slow News Day? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is as much "perceived value" in style and interface as there is "perceived value" in genuine performance. A computer is a tool to do something, and for the vast majority of users not running servers, the interface contributes to the tool's usefulness as much as teh megahurtz.
Having used some truly horrible interfaces in my time, and having seen the real productivity improvements that come with superior design, I assign a pretty high value to usability. Just look at any recent Motorola phone *shudder*.
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Apples problem is that they don't lower the prices of machines over time like the other computer makers do. So, if you buy a Mac right after a refresh the prices are usually very competitive.
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Dells are cost-competitive with sourcing the parts yourself and building it at home (not that this is even possible with an all-in-one or decent laptop).
Refresh is not working for me.. (Score:5, Funny)
I've now tried refreshing several times, but in my browser Mac prices stay the same.
Should I switch to Safari?
The problem is (Score:5, Interesting)
Thus it is overpriced if you don't need the hardware they are trying to push. They don't have a mid range tower at all.
You can go down to their all in ones, but of course those come with their own problems. A big one would be why do I want to get a nice monitor, if I am going to have to get rid of it when the computer attached to it is obsolete? Monitors last longer than computers, particularly nice ones. You get a nice 24" IPS LCD, man, that's a keeper for a long time. However, the computer is going to get outdated at the same rate all computers do, which is to say fairly quickly. So if you buy the all in ones, you have to get a monitor every time you want a computer upgrade.
That's a waste of money to most of us. Pretty much everyone I know keeps their monitors well past their computers. Either they buy cheap monitors, in which case they generally keep them until they break because they don't want to spend any more money on a display than they have to, or they buy good monitors, and they keep them because the monitor is still a good monitor and works for many years.
I have a nice 26" IPS panel that I plan on keeping probably until it fails. Hell, first thing to go out on it will be the backlight, and I can and most likely will buy new tubes and a new ballast and replace it. It's a great display and when the day comes that I retire it from my primary system, it'll work very nicely on my guest system. No reason to throw it away in a couple years. However if it were tied to my computer, well that's what would happen. I upgrade my system very regularly. My monitor though, that lasts.
So that's where the complaints against Apple's price tend to come from. It isn't that they are necessarily bad if you do a straight 1:1 comparison. It is that they don't offer many choices, and one of the choices they exclude is one of the most popular choices: consumer desktop/tower and separate monitor. People like that choice, and businesses REALLY like that choice. If you want a separate monitor, you either have to get a very low end system, with no upgradability (mini) or an amazingly powerful workstation (pro). Nothing in the middle range. Thus for most people, the pro is what they'd look at and it is expensive.
Show me a mac tower with a single dual core processor and regular DDR2 RAM and then we can talk. Until then the choices are a system that isn't powerful or expandable enough or a system that is overpriced.
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I disagree. The only entities I see bemoaning the lack of an "xMac" (a modestly-powered headless upgradeable desktop Mac) are some geeks on sites like Slashdot and Ars Technica. I don't see any desire whatsoever from Joe and Jane Consumer, who are Apple's target market.
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For example, high end ECC 72bit Ram is a lot more expensive the Joe Blow's 'generic' Ram.
Look at high quality motherboards, also more expensive and better, but still x86.
Higher end motherboards last longer, run cooler and have a lot more features then the 399 dell special.
Now, for all I know Apple is using the exact smae brand and model of motherboards as Dell does. I'm just pointing out the there are reasons some x86
machines are more ex
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Opinions are like a**holes: everybody has one. You're certainly welcome to not buy into my opinion, but I won't sit here and rehash all the previous Psystar articles and suspicions just for your benefit.
Sure, maybe Psystar turns out to be the bestest company in the world, evar!!!1! -- but I'm not sending them any of my money to find out. I'm not convinced, I think they're more likely to vanish when the spotlight on them gets brighter; That's my opinion. And I t
Re:Slow News Day? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot covered this before, as have other sites. In summary, the company pulled credit card orders a few short days after announcing the product. Efforts to track down the company at its real-life address turned out to be difficult, and we still have not seen any evidence that the company is legit (there was no business by its name at the address listed on its site). When confronted with this information the company changed its physical address on its website numerous times, none of which seem to reflect a real business. THAT is why it seems shady. Indeed, it looks like this is an amateur operation at best, a scam at worst.
Go ahead. Do it. I've done it, as have many others. When you don't make cheap excuses like "oh yeah let's leave out the Bluetooth, 'cos who uses it anyways?" you'll find that Macs are quite competitive. Yes, there's still a premium, but "as overpriced as can be" is not it. I would say Sony's are far more overpriced than Macs.
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Re:Slow News Day? (Score:4, Insightful)
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How the hell... (Score:4, Insightful)
In that case having open source is again working against Apple.
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And it is defiantly benefiting their users, however they only seam to be fixing hackingtosh stuff
obligatory star wars parody reference (Score:5, Funny)
Apple doesn't dare sue them (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is unlikely to sue Psystar. Apple would probably lose; Apple's EULA is an "illegal tying arrangement" under antitrust law. Psystar is tiny, but a court loss would encourage bigger players to start making clones.
More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.
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More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.
No, all they have to do is stamp the words "Upgrade: for computers with OS X 10.3 or earlier only" on the box - which is effectively what they're selling anyway. If a court decided to rule that illegal it would set some very interesting precedents for Microsoft et. al.
Wasn't the ruling in the recent Skype vs. the GPL case (where they tried to use antitrust law) something along the lines that, if a copyright holder wanted to specify that their software should only be distributed in a green envelope, such
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FYI (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare Dell's unit sales to HP's unit sales to Apple's unit sales for a given segment and you'll find Apple in the top-5 for sure on any given month. In laptops, Apple is #1 per unit and dollar and has been for a really, really long time.
Still, I doubt there's the expertise on
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How can a company with 4% of the market be bound by anti-trust laws?
Read up on the Kodak [findlaw.com] case. Kodak tried to keep third-party maintenance firms from buying Kodak repair parts. The monopoly was defined as being in spare parts for Kodak copiers, not the entire copier market. That went to the Supreme Court, and Kodak lost.
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It seems to me that even in that kind of case, you'd have to define the market as operating systems that can run on intel machines. Even if you narrowed it to just the configuration that psystar is selling, that would still put windows as the dominant os for
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The computer already comes with the OS disks that were current when you bought it. Why, since the death of OS 9, would you even NEED a full new set of install disks if you were a "legitimate" Mac owner?
Alternatively, if you have damaged oem disks, they might let you trade them in a full copy of the same version -- you'd still have to buy the upgrade though.
That would enable them to kill off the clone market without inhibiting "legitimat
Re:Apple doesn't dare sue them (Score:4, Informative)
More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.
Uhh... and how would Mac owners upgrade to the latest OS? Download how many gigabytes of files that make up Leopard?? Oh yeah... I got hours to sit around and wait for that to complete.
Think before you post.
Same way countless other software companies have done, by shipping an "Upgrade Only" version that requires you to have a legitimate install before upgrading.
Think before you post.
Apple doing nothing is best response (Score:5, Interesting)
Please stop calling it a clone! (Score:5, Interesting)
This box is NOT a clone, it is a hackintosh [wikipedia.org]. Please refer to it as such, but not a clone. A true clone would have EFI firmware, not EFI emulation. It would require no hacks to install OS X, it would cleanly install and be recognized by the OS.
I believe this would actually be a desirable system if it really were a clone... but with that fan noise problem and all, how many people would really want one?
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Then again, I thought this was some sort of scam? Didn't someone try to find their "headquarters" and figured out the address was a m
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If it's cheaper and runs OS X, then why not?
I gots no problem with Psystar selling a hackintosh. My main nit is calling them clones, which not even Psystar itself is doing. But for $555 (base system plus Leopard), I think the loud system fans are worth taking into consideration, as well as the unknown status of updates going forward. Buying one of these is a gamble many of us would consider taking, as even if Psystar gets slapped down by Apple we'd still have a halfway decent PC that just needed a new OS; could probably trade the copy of Leopard fo
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A true clone would have EFI firmware, not EFI emulation. It would require no hacks to install OS X, it would cleanly install and be recognized by the OS.
This is where I am confused.
IBM released the PC. Compaq cloned the bios, followed by everyone including your mother, mother's brother, neighbor, neighbor's dog. The rest of the PC was based on open specifications so poof, you have clones. Clones became the standard.
Ok, now the 21st century. EFI was an intel invention, currently managed by the Unified EFI forum. Is apple's implantation of EFI is unique? If not, it wouldn't be a clone would it?
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I haven't seen info to say whether the Gigabyte motherboard used in the Pystar has this capability (but it's not configured) or if it's just not there. But as
Apple doesn't have to be the one... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe Apple Wants This To Happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe Apple Wants This To Happen (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the main reasons Apples are stable is because the hardware they have to support comes from a very small bin. Heck, even with that they're not 100% bug free (google MBP keyboard issues).
A lot of problems in Windows come from either poor drivers or low-quality components (which in turn often have old/poor drivers). For all of the flack we give MS, they do an alright job considering they have to support millions and millions of combinations of hardware.
If next month they released a generic PC capable OSX it would be a disaster. Most of their problems would come from bargain-bin PCs from Joe Sixpack trying to run OSX on his $150 Walmart box.
Linux has been dealing with this for a few years now, and though the community drivers are quite good, a lot of distros have problems with more "unique" or cruddy hardware.
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Given the historical ferocity of Apple Legal .... (Score:2, Funny)
1) Apple knows the EULA is non-binding, and doesn't want to mess with the negative press of trying to squish small startup guy. I find this hard to believe as they have had little problem with this tactic in the past.
2) Steve didn't get the memo about psystar yet...Right.... this is even more unlikely, because if he had, there would be a crater where psy
OS X EULA text, interpretation (Score:2)
So ... the license restricts your use on Apple-labeled computers but says nothing of non-Apple-labeled computers. You can interpret this in two ways: Since it does not restrict you from using the Apple Software on non-Apple-labeled computers, you are thus limitless, or you can slap an Apple, Inc. sticker on your computer (or build your computer w
Re:OS X EULA text, interpretation (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as you're looking for interesting ways to read the end user license agreement, isn't that a license between Apple and the end user? PsyStar is reselling the OS, not using it.
Oh, the irony... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh, the irony... (Score:4, Informative)
If the dude released his work under BSD, then he has no right to complain. If he released it under GPL, and PsyStar is making the source available, then he has no right to complain.
If he released it under his own license, then sue away, and be happy :)
One of three things can happen (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple can sue Psystar and seek to get legal enforcement to EULA that right now has the illusion of authority. If they lose, they null and void all the EULA's in existence. Sometimes the illusion is effective enough.
Apple can make a deal with Psystar by liscensing the OS or buying out the company. That action will only encourage further cloning
The more likely action is Apple will wait an see the impact on the hardware business while planning on instituting a technological barrier for 10.6. Right now, the
A conspiracy theory, submitted for your approval. (Score:4, Funny)
"You know what this means?" he asks me, twirling a faded Apple ][+ case badge in his hand. "Opus Dei. I have some friends I'd like you to meet."
In walks Gates and Ballmer. Ballmer is in a Masonic apron and Gates says, "You know what Gates translates to in Aramaic? Bilderberger." L. Ron Hubbard (Jobs kept calling him honey-pie) then walks in with an Apple IIe prototype, or so it seems. Opens it up. Juice cans. Ballmer forces me down into the chair with a big meaty hand. In 3 hours, I'd gone clear. They had me in the basement of Novation for a few years with a chip puller, replacing perfectly fine commodity ICs with compromised chips made of pure evil. All of those g-philes about homemade bombs and manufacturing cocaine out of draino? No one in the BBS scene wrote them. They sprang forth onto boards in the middle of the night from those compromised ICs. The concept was to cause disruption and chaos in the suburbs. Why? They wouldn't tell me. But when I'd proven myself by not asking questions, they moved me up through the ranks. OS/2 Warp was mine. As was the scuttling of that product line when it didn't match this infernal cabal's machinations. But I've said too much already.
NeXT? What you don't know is how many of those were sold to the Soviets. You don't see many of them anymore; most of them were made of an unstable polycarbonate which, when exposed to alcohol, denatures into something like sarin gas. But I'm not supposed to be telling you that. The Russians are well known for computing drunk. Vodka. NeXT cube. You know what happens next. How do you think we won the cold war? The NeXT cubes you might have seen are facsimiles. If you've seen one powered on, all you've seen is a hacked version of Windowmaker running on embedded Linux. Don't believe me? Fine, be a sheep.
About a year ago Jobs calls me in. The Pope is there, as is Hubbard (who did not, in fact, expire in the California desert as the Church of Scientology would have you believe). Jobs says, "You know, people are fucking with my OS. I can't have that. Soon, we're going to see hackintoshes all over the god damned Pacific Rim. This is what you're going to do," he says to me. "We're going to start a shell company and we're going to build the worst goddamned hackintosh you can imagine. It should be loud enough to make all of the audio capabilities of the thing damn near useless. Crippled, but intriguing. That's your mantra. Fuck insanely great - the only mantra you have going forward is 'Crippled, but Intriguing.' I want you and my friends here to work it," and he motions behind me.
Standing behind me are 14 original members of the Process Church - Processians, who you might remember from the Manson connection. God and Satan in league. Turns out Jobs was a double agent, working for both the Catholics and Processians. Which side he favored is unclear to this day. But we lit out for Florida in the early morning hours to pull off the Crippled but Intriguing thing.
Jennifer Lopez, who, inexplicably was one of the "original Processians" but had somehow become age-resistant during a joint working of the Temple of Set and the OTO in 1979, says to me, "It is important that this fails. We want to sour the concept of the hackintosh in the mind of the public. It will put this issue to rest, once and for all."
We then proceeded to discuss Enochian magick and grimoires and all the casual kinds of stuff you normally discuss with an electronics-savvy death cult in a 1979 Econoline van on the way to Florida, and so we got there and set up shop.
I could be killed for posting this. But take it under advisement. There are dark fucking AEONIC FORCES behind this thing, and if you can figure out the kind of gematria Jobs is into, you'll figure out what Psystar *really* means (in A
exagerating apple prices (Score:3, Interesting)
"One version of Psystar's Open Computer features Apple's Leopard OS X 10.5 operating system ported onto generic PC hardware that includes anIntel (NSDQ: INTC) Core2Duo processor at 2.66 GHz, a 250 GB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card.
The system is priced at $804.99. A similar, Apple-branded computer could cost more than $2,000. "
They are here comparing their core2due based system, to the mac pros which *8 core harpertown xeon* system with a 1600 mhz bus and 800 mhz memory. They aren't in the same class, the mac pros are heavy duty workstations, and what they are selling are dinky gaming boxes.
The mac pro processor, straight from intel, costs *alone* more than these guys entire system. So the comparison isn't even close to valid.
The truth is that apple's higher end stuff has maybe a 10 or 20% markup over what you could get form dell *with the same hardware*. People often look at the 2000 or 3000 dollar computers and think they are overpriced, but what they aren't taking into account is that apple tends to use very expensive components, like the 1600 mhz bus harpertowns (most expensive cpu on the market), 800 mhz ram, maybe a raid card so you can use SAS harddrives.
The mid to low end systems and the laptops are actually the systems where you are really paying the apple tax; however, even there it's never a 5 times the cost of the competition like they are claiming.
The main problem the lineup apple has is that it has a limited range of products. They have good options for the low end, and the very high end, but they don't have the cheap but upgradeable desktops that gamers like, and they don't offer a whole lot in the server market (they have *1* model of server).
Really, since gaming on the mac sucks anyway, what I'd like to see is some kind of generic osx for servers, or at least a better darwin that's actually usable. That way, you could develop on real mac dev machines, and deploy to a darwin server.
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