$399 Mac Clone Most Likely a Hoax

timholman writes "According to Gizmodo, an investigation has shown that the $399 OpenMac is almost certainly vaporware, as is Psystar itself. The company's address has actually changed twice this week, according to its web page, and Psystar is no longer accepting credit card transactions. Too bad for those who may have already ordered an OpenMac."

Comments

Re:Will it exist in 30 days

[Vellmont]

Commodore did that all the time. I'd recommend "On the Edge" (which details a lot of other semi-shady practices of the whole industry).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0973864907/ref=pd_bbs_olp_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208554130&sr=8-2

The OpenPro

[goombah99]

My guess here is that the $399 is just a PR gimmic. If you actually spec it out on their site, the basic model+Leopard+firewire+shipping is over $650 dollars. Whereas you can get a mac mini for under $600 including the shipping. The difference is the mac mini is small, quiet, lower power, and has wifi, blue tooth, optical dolby audio, and software update will work. (The pystar has a bigger faster hard disk and a 15% faster CPU). Personally I think you'd have to be retarded to think the mac was not a better value for a low-end end user, especially due to the software update,noise and power.

So I think that was just a stunt. The real bargain on the site is the openPro which has a bigger power supply and better case permitting it to hold a high end graphics card and quad processor. A nicely specced unit of the openPro would be $1800 for quad 2.6Ghz and an nvidia 8800Gt card, including shipping, Leopard (firewire built in, and USB jacks on the front). This is actually now compartable to the apple powermac quad, which simmilarly speced runs about $2700, with a 10% faster CPU, blue tooth, wireliess, optical audio, and an amazing case design, and relatively quiet operation.

However to be fair, the apple's sweet spot for powermac pricing is at the 8 processor model. That's "only" $500 more. The psystar is not available in an 8 processor.

Re:Will it exist in 30 days

[Paradise Pete]

I always enjoy reading stories about that stuff

SoftRAM is a good story. They sold 600,000 copies of a program that they claimed would compress the contents of RAM, effectively doubling the available amount. It turned out that the program didn't even attempt it.

Re:Will it exist in 30 days

[falconwolf]

Back in the early days of home computing a number of companies started up by selling vaporware, collecting the money, and using it to fund the development. (I don't recall if Apple was one of the companies that started up that way. But Woz and Jobs were pretty hard up for cash back at the start.)

The Woz already had a working Apple before offering one for sale. He was showing it to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, of which the Two Steves were members of. At the tyme the Woz was working for HP as an engineer and asked them if the company wanted to make the Apple, management turned him down. Jobs was able to find a store that would place a large order but in order to fulfill it the Woz had to quit working at HP. In order to fund the company the Woz sold an HP 65 calculator he owned for $500.

Falcon

Re:Will it exist in 30 days

[MojoStan]

Microsoft. Sold an operating system to IBM before they had one. No, they agreed to provide one and then bought it from someone else. Expanding the story, Microsoft told IBM that they didn't have an OS. MS bundled CP/M with one of their programming language products and IBM mistakenly believed the bundled OS was a Microsoft product. MS then referred IBM to Digital Research (maker of CP/M), but Digital Research dropped the ball. Paul Allen knew about a rudimentary CP/M clone (QDOS) made by a small company across town (Seattle Computer Products), so MS convinced IBM they could fix up this OS and make it work for the IBM PC. Initially, MS licensed QDOS from SCP, but they later agreed to purchase it for $50,000 (deal of the century).

The false "DOS was vaporware" version of what happened often gets modded up on Slashdot. This is the version told on that stupid made-for-TV, "based on a true story" docudrama Pirates of the Silicon Valley . A much better telling of what actually happened (with actual interviews with Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, Jack Sams of IBM, and Tim Patterson of SCP) is available from the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds (transcript of the relevant part available here).