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First Psystar Mac Clones Ship
An anonymous reader writes "According to Gizmodo, Psystar has begun shipping its Macintosh clones, thus proving that the company is not a hoax. Initial impressions seem to be positive, though Software Update does not work."
Plop the mini's hardware into a mini-tower case, and tack on 1 PCI-E x16 slot, 1 PCI-E x1 slot, and 1 regular PCI slot, and then we'd have a machine worthy of my purchase. Until that point I'll keep on using my hacked up generic "mac" and my old PowerMac G4.
What they need is a Mac Pro Mini (or Mini Mac Pro). Basically, half a Mac Pro:
* Single dual or quad-core CPU
* 4 DIMM slots for 8G-16G RAM (2G standard)
* PCIe x16 slot (with room for dual-width cards)
* PCIe x4 slot
* PCIe x1 slot
* Two internal 3.5" bays, w/RAID1 or RAID0 on the chipset.
* One internal 5.25" bay (Dual layer DVDRW standard)
* Priced from about US$1100.
Of course, Apple will never do this because it would absolutely slaughter higher-margin Mac Pro sales.
I have to wonder why they have not tried to get a preliminary injunction to halt shipment pending legal matters. They probably could get that fairly easily.
They're probably weighing it against the possibility of having their "you can only install the copy of OS X you bought onto our list of blessed hardware" clause in the OS X EULA ruled invalid.
These aren't clones. They're Hackintoshes done for you and then shipped out. The OS isn't legit, iLife isn't legit, and you're dumping entirely too much money on the hardware that they're shipping out as there's no software cost at all.
I've got to wonder why Software Update isn't working on them, even though they've admitted to using the EFI loader hack. In my experience, only OS updates (ie 10.5.1->10.5.2) are potentially dangerous anymore, and I managed to update from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 without issue on an oldish Shuttle AMD barebones box here after patching EFI/Vanilla kernel.
It's almost trivial to get a vanilla kernel up & running on an Intel hackintosh now, only slightly more difficult on an AMD box -- there are even several quite good pre-packaged installers now with 10.5.2 that do everything for you if you don't like to get your hands dirty.
All that said, it's going to be funny when all of the people duped into buying these can't update to 10.5.4 or whatever and end up with a bricked box. At least if you do it yourself, you develop the skillset to boot into single user mode, disable kexts, remove caches etc.
Maintaining a functioning, stable, up-to-date Hackintosh (with Quartz Extreme running properly etc) is a lot like keeping a '60s Volkswagen running. Not particularly difficult, but you build up the skills over time and it takes quite a bit of patience. I think there are going to be a lot of pissed off people once they realize what they've bought into.