Slashdot Mirror
Psystar Offers $399 "OpenMac" Computer
mytrip writes to tell us that Psystar has announced a new line of Intel-based computers that promise to run an unmodified version of Mac OS X "Leopard". Unfortunately almost immediately after the launch their website went down and as of this story remains unaccessible. "Astute readers may well hear this news and ask themselves if it doesn't sound like a Mac clone, something whose time came -- during Gil Amelio's tenure at Apple -- and went shortly after current CEO Steve Jobs assumed the helm at the company. [...] It definitely defies the EULA for Mac OS X, which specifies that the purchaser of a legal copy of Leopard is entitled to install the operating system on an Apple-branded computer. If you buy the $399 OpenMac, you can check the EULA yourself if you also buy the pre-install option, as the company includes a retail copy of Leopard with your purchase."
Web site works fine. Quit copying from the macobserver.com and do your own homework.
This is fortunate:
coral cache
(slow, of course...)
Here's the page specific to their Mac clone.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
In English, the word "slashdot" does start with the letter "S."
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
There are two independent computer shops near my place which will put together a hackintosh for you. They won't install the OS, but they'll build a computer that is fully compatible with os X and sell you a copy of osx too...
So... for me, this isn't news, really.
Profit margins are about 25% depending on the product line. This is according to actual financial figures. You know, profit reports and such. Things that have to be correct and accurate for legal purposes or they're in trouble with the SEC for misleading stockholders. Real data, instead of you pulling shit out of your ass.
Macs are not more expensive; they're just less flexible. True, you can't get a Mac with slots for less than a Mac Pro. You can't get a Mac laptop with a 7-inch screen and ultra low processor/memory/drive for $400. But for what they do sell - Mac Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro - they're similar, generally only varying by a few bucks here and there (except Apple's memory is damn expensive for some reason). This little dance has been done a billion times, and will be done a billion times again.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Developers: We can use your help.
Not only are others trying to do this now, there are also plenty of examples from Apple's past that illustrate how dangerous such a product would be to Apple's bottom line. Whether it's Franklin Apple II's, the Brazilian early Mac clones, or Apple's own licensing fiasco in the early PowerPC days, it's clear that Apple must be very protective or take a serious punch to profits. Remember Power Computing? In the licensing days of Apple, before Jobs returned and pole-axed the licenses, Power Computing was really starting to hurt Apple. They were releasing faster hardware earlier than Apple, and even their primitive marketing efforts (who remembers, "Let's kick Intel's Ass" with the Sluggo cartoon?) were getting the best of Apple. They were really starting to carve out their own share of Apple's customers before Jobs pulled the plug.
Apple has for YEARS flat-out *refused* to build a Mac of this type - a normal headless box. They come out with the Mac Mini, which many said was the same thing, but it uses laptop memory and harddrives, which are more expensive per MB/GB, and the thing isn't even upgradable. The Mac Pro is a Xeon workstation, and uses memory to match, and starts at, what, $2k or so? C'mon!
And here's what's really sad for Apple and their shareholders -- the profit margins at what Apple would likely price these things at would likely be much higher than those for iMacs and Mac Minis. Normal 3.5" HDs and regular DDR2 DIMMs are much less expensive than the laptop and workstation-class hardware.
This is a gaping hole in their product lineup, and it's been there as long as I can remember. It's no wonder someone wants to fill that hole. It's just too bad that Apple is going to wipe them out of existence by the end of the week for doing what Apple should've done ten years ago.
Of course, Apple knows all this. Selling machines with built-in displays and non-upgradable machines with limited storage is great for Apple's bottomline: it forces people to upgrade when non-replaceable parts break and non-upgradable machines are too slow to handle modern tasks. But it's also screwing the customer. Fortunately, Jobs' Reality Distortion Field overrides people's common sense (and lack of knowledge about computer hardware in general) so that they FEEL good about their purchase.
OS X, on the other hand, is tied to hardware sales so Apple doesn't have to support the vast and sometimes flaky hardware of the greater PC world. And also so they can make more money selling hardware.
PC_EFI is a bootloader that's been around in the OSx86 community for some time now. Version 8 allows for GPT partition booting and a host of other features, including the ability to wrap OS X's early graphical booting to a card with a VGA BIOS instead.
These guys are just stealing work contributed to OSx86, throwing it on a standard PC, and trying to sell it. That's very shady, if you ask me.
BTW: OS X 10.5 boots on *many* different motherboards and *many* different configurations, if the kernel and kernel extensions support it (SSE3, PCI-E, etc). PC_EFI is purely a bootloader that emulates some EFI things so a stock Macintosh kernel thinks it's booting on a Mac. It has nothing to do with the hardware, there's plenty of kernel extensions and drivers floating around that support quite a fair chunk of hardware.
-DN
http://www.internetlibrary.com/cases/lib_case209.cfm Court holds that Gateway's Standard Terms and Conditions, supplied along with and inside the packaging of a computer purchased by the plaintiff, do not create a binding contract with that consumer under either the law of either Missouri or Kansas. The court reached this conclusion despite the fact that the Standard Terms provide that they will constitute the terms of such an agreement if the consumer retains the computer for more than 5 days, and the consumer so retained the computer. Look up "Software license agreement", the law is not clear cut at all.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
There has to be benifit to both parties for a contract to be valid. I can't just throw $200 at apple and get software that I they say I can't use without having the option to return it. Since the parties involved refuse to accept returned software the return policy is unconscionable and the license may be void.
Second, you can't agree to a contract that you never had an opportunity to read and accept or decline. I think that one is obvious.
So, yes, Apple might not like the outcome of a court case.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Apple didn't use TPM or this discussion would be moot. I probably should not discuss it in detail due to the DMCA but I suspect that reminding people that Google is your friend is safely on the legal side of the DMCA.
And being a little more bold I'll narrow your searching and just mention that there is a fairly radioactive set of patches for Qemu to allow unmodified copies of OS X to boot.
Democrat delenda est
You're talking copyright law. EULA's are contracts and fall under contract law. Barring a few select exceptions (minors, contracts of adhesion, yadda yadda yadda), if you do something that constitutes accepting the contract, you're bound by it. And nothing personal, but could anyone discussing "fair use" on /. take a sec to learn what the term actually means? You know, section 107 of the Copyright Act and all?
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
If you RTFA you'd see, "...and we will preinstall Leopard for free so you can begin to use your computer right out of the box."
Apple policy is that I'm not supposed to sell service parts to anyone but another authorized service provider, unless I install the parts in a computer.
Apple doesn't have a problem with me giving you a price quote on a part.
Now, I don't give a fuck what Apple policy is, and if I'm convinced you know what you're doing, I'll sell you the parts anyway. If it's a 661- (return dead part to Apple) part, you're going to pay a lot more to do it yourself, since I'm going to charge you stock price for the part. If you'd posted which model G4 and which fan, my reply would likely have a price for you.
I do have to be convinced you know what you're doing, because I don't want you calling Apple when you break something.
And I'm not a zit-faced dork. I've been working on Apple computers for over 15 years. The certification I have doesn't mean anything, but the experience does.
I'm posting as anonymous because I just admitted I break Apple's rules.
Their only mistake is selling OSX pre-installed. Now if they sold it with Darwin (the open source underpinnings to OSX) pre-installed, how would that be bad? They could load up X11 and gnome or KDE for the GUI part of things. Granted, that isn't what people expect with OSX, but it avoids the EULA issue altogether. I would imagine, but don't know, that once Darwin is running, it would be relatively easy for people to install OSX over it. But as a business, Pystar needs to leave the dirty work to the end user if they want to stay in business.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good