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."
I'm sure it's gonna take Apple seconds to upgrade their OS so that it refuses to work on these things.
..but if they do, public perception of Leopard might go
from 'just works' to 'upgrades may be fatal'. So no
wonder they may want these units to not ship at all
even if technically it would be trivial to render them
into regular PCs.
BTW, how hard would it to hack this "EFI V8 emulator" into any PC that uses the same parts?
So are they good and enforcable this week, or evil and unenforceable? Seeing as this pertains to Apple it's probably a coin toss. The fanbois will all chime in with how it's such a good thing that Apple restricts what hardware one can run OS X on, and how this company should be shut down. If this were about some MS EULA there would be a firestorm about how EULA's are bogus anyways and unenforceble.
If I buy OS X I'll damn well run it on any machine I want. In fact, one of my two OS X machines is *not* Appple Branded. That's right, it's a Hackintosh. Sue me, Jobs.
I predict 100 posts from people saying "Apple can do whatever they damn well want with their OS!" from the very same people who scream bloody murder if MS so much as includes a media player with their OS.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
These aren't the first people to try something like this. People used to post instructions on buying various 3rd party PPC boards to build your own Mac.
The interesting part of this is that they have vowed to challenge Apple's EULA in court if (he he he, "if") they get sued. The outcome of that battle will be interesting. I want to say I'm on Apple's side on this one (they should get to say "only on Macs"), but a big part of me hates all the crazy restrictions in EULAs and I'm sure if Apple wasn't in a minority position I'd be crying foul over that clause as monopolistic.
The somewhat sad part is that this could satisfy quite a bit of the complains I've seen on /. and other places asking for an upgradeable Mac that costs less than the Mac Pro. Yet the hobbled the default configuration with integrated graphics. I also enjoy the bits I've read about this where they recommend AGAINST installing OS X updates until they say it's OK because it could easily hose the system.
All and all, while I don't expect this to go anywhere, it will be amusing to watch.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
In English, the word "cease" does not start with the letter "S."
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.
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
The catch with the "Mac Tax" is that while you can't configure a Mac to have less than the shipping hardware (integrated camera, gigabit ethernet, do-it-yourself RAM, firewire, etc.), when pricing against equivalent hardware, they usually are cost-equal or a hair less. In the case of the Mac Pro, the difference is almost 25% given the CPU horsepower with which the system ships. At release, it was impossible to find a four-way workstation within $1000 of Apple's hardware.
This isn't to say Apple's the value leader, quite the opposite. Their surcharge on disk and RAM borders on userous; the video choices, while current at release, are updated slowly and tend not to support the more advanced configurations (SLI). That said, I'll take Apple's build quality over almost anything else, and for me at least, OSX significantly improves my workflow over Windows. YMMV.
Why should Steve listen to you, or anyone who advocates Mac cloning?
The last time Apple tried it, the move almost cost the company its life. Power Computing and UMAX moved in on the high end and cannibalised Apple's most lucrative sales of Power Macs (and cannibalised is the right word; Apple did all the engineering for PCC, while the Austin firm just built boxes).
Power and Motorola also moved in on the bottom end (which is where Apple wanted them to sell anyway), but it was the PowerTower Pros that really hurt Apple's business and licensing program.
There's an error in the submission, too. There was no Apple "cloning" program. None of the Mac OS Licensees designed their own boards until well into the program (two years), and they all used "Old World" architecture. The licensing program actually started under Spindler, not Amelio.
If Apple licensed the OS for non-Apple PCs, it'd be the same story all over again, albeit less severe, as Apple has diversified in the past several years. Dell (or whoever) would race Apple to the bottom on prices, and Apple's R+D budget would be cut short. Macs wouldn't "just work" anymore, and someone at Apple would be stuck writing drivers for every piece of nonstandard hardware junk the licensees wanted to install to get the price down.
If a $300.00 premium every few years when I buy a new Mac is the cost of avoiding these kinds of headaches, I'm happy to pay it.
If TFA is right, the $399 includes Leopard.
TFA is wrong. they sell it as a $150 install add on, or you can do it yourself for $125.And, as I keep pointing out whenever I hear this "bundling is great when Apple does it" argument: the whole point is I don't want half of the crap that a mac makes me pay for, anyways.
Well this comes down to philosophy. On most mac's i've owned there's been some feature I did not use. e.g. PC card, or a scsi port or bluetooth. that's true.But what I have noticed is too things. First, developers can target more fully featured software because they can assume high level features will be installed. For example, who can foreget the old nightmare days if configuring soundcards or interupts on PCs and the difficulty of finding software that worked with your card. Macs all had (somewhat) high end sound cards from very early days and the driver's for them in the OS distro. So developers could assume they existed.
As a result even though I might not actually need some cheerful toon in some piece of software I bought, the developer just threw it in because they could have no fear it would work.
As a result, I actually tend to use the extras mac includes more often simply because software I buy happens for one purpose takes advantage of them.
The other thing I notice is that while I might not have used firewire on the first mac I bought I definitely started using it on later macs. And bought firewire disks. But then I noticed that my new hardware was backwards compatible with my old macs.
nice... this meant my macs had longer service lifetime because I was not going and trying to find comaptiblilty extensions and drivers. the old macs had them.
In the long run, specing at the high end and getting bundles that are quite cheap for what they include, seems to pay off even if you don't use all the features right away.
the only place where ala-carte specing seems to really pay off is on racks of servers or fleets of comuters (for say an office). There dropping something you know you won't need can save a few dollars.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I want the Mac Apple refuses to sell me: an upgradeable machine that doesn't have ridiculous components (Xeons, FB-DIMMS) that maybe 0.01% of the userbase actually needs.
Jobs refuses to sell it because he knows people will buy it. He fears this because he is in love with AIO and wants people to buy iMacs even when they aren't a fit for their needs. He also is under the delusion that creating a Mac upgradeable prosumer desktop will somehow "Dell-ize" Apple. The reality, which most Mac users understand, is that what is actually valuable about Macs is not their different-ness, but the fact that they run OS X, which is the best consumer operating system on the market. Mac hardware is not special. It got even less special after 2005. Mac SOFTWARE is what is special.
+++ATH0
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.
They could argue that the first sale doctrine allows them to modify and resell it.
To get around the EULA, they could bypass the "I agree to sell my soul" box by disassembling the installer program, and disabling the EULA dialog. So they never "Agree" to the license.
Of course installing the software necessarily involves making a copy, from the DVD media to the computer's memory and hard drive. While you might think a license would be needed to perform this copying, in fact Title 17, section 117 specifically exempts this copying: I don't think Psystar can win, but this is more a reflection of the power that the copyright cartels wield over the government. (BTW I like Apple and would not look forward to another clone war, but that's a different post).