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Mac Cloner Psystar Ships First Service Pack
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.
Now Apple has to compete with it's own product. I mean, making a product better them MS wasn't exatly a challenge, was it?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Really big hairy ones that must be protected by some sort of anti-steve force field.
Or maybe they're eunichs (sp?) and steve can't cut off their balls.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
The system is priced at $804.99. A similar, Apple-branded computer could cost more than $2,000.
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.
tar can already process streams just fine, there's no need for a fork.
I remember this happening in the days of the Apple ][, what with the Peach and other clones. But then, you had to get the ROMs. Maybe this time will turn out (un)successful (depending on your point of view :)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
We'll see no lawsuit. This gives Apple more exposure. If they do sue, I won't be offering them a bandage for their blown-off foot.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
{ - Generic Guy - }
... are they shipping a service pack to correct problems in Apple's binaries - or are they downloading the open source portions and fixing/rebuilding/shipping those as fixes?
In that case having open source is again working against Apple.
begun, the mac war has.
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
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.
Buy doing nothing Apple isn't give any free press to this company. Companies like do are only looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. People who want Mac's will buy Mac and get a better deal once you factor in cost of OS X the clone isn't that good a deal. Down the road they will have trouble keeping up with updates and etc. In other words leave them alone and they will go back to being just another white box computer maker.
Andy
This box is NOT a clone, it is a hackintosh . 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?
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Netkas, one of the hackers that basically made OSX86 possible, is not happy about how they've taken a community effort that was trying to stay away from the Apple hammer by not being involved with money. ON his blog netkas.org, he's updated the EFI bootloader license to be non-commercial...of course this would imply he'd have to reveal himself...
Just maybe Apple is allowing this to continue to test the waters for a PC version of OS/X
I am a bit stymied about why this company has not at least been served cease and desist papers. I can only suppose 1 of 2 things is going on here:
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 psystar hq used to be by now.
Who knows - maybe Steve is finally going soft....
The mac market share isn't 4%. That's a dumb number that's used to make Windows appear much more dominant.
/. for a legitimate discussion about anti-trust.
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
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The funniest part of this whole thing is the guy who wrote the patch that allows Psystar to install Apple's OS X on their PC boxes is pissed because Psystar is using his "free software" to make tons of cash and they are not giving him any of the profit. What's ironic is the fact that he blatantly violated Apple's EULA, and is now surprised that Psystar is violating his EULA. LOL.
even cheaper right after a refresh
:-)
I've now tried refreshing several times, but in my browser Mac prices stay the same.
Should I switch to Safari?
Insert
I'd bide my time on this. Allowing another company to make a similar, cheaper, but of a lesser quality product can often have a beneficial impact on the original product. In this case users that may have been prohibited by the Mac price tag may be able to pick up a product with a similar/same OS and begin to use it. Down the line these consumers may like the product and decide the next time to spend a little extra to get the "good" one. Worse comes to worst Apple can always enforce its EULA, which would be interesting because you don't often see those types of court cases, and can regain their market share.
"Say you love us like i know you will and that our deaths won't be in vain or in the name of gasoline"
They don't have a consumer desktop line, which is what a whole lot of people and companies want. Their Mac Pros are good for the money if and only if you actually need all the high end hardware they mandate. The entry level Mac Pro is $2800 with no monitor. Now that's no surprising as it features things like dual quad core Xeons. Ok, fine, but there are very, very, very few apps that can use 8 cores. There are, in fact, very few that can use 4 cores. So for most people it, like much of the other high end hardware you have to get (ECC RAM, for example) is a waste of money. Consider that MPC (our supplier at work) will happily sell me a single quad core desktop for just under $1000.
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.
Well, your reading of the EULA is interesting. Slapping an Apple logo on a non-Apple computer, though, would be a violation of Apple's trademark in their logo.
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.
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".
FalconShould there be a Law?
I was there in Cupertino in the early days. On my third day of employment I was called into Jobs's office. He was there, alone, in drag. He lifts up the blue skirt he was wearing, and BAM. Cilice.
"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
It's true that there's a lot of markup on apple hardware, especially the low end stuff. However, these guys are claiming that their hardware is *one fourth* the cost for a similar system, which is clearly not true.
"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.
Sorry, you loose at funny. If you want to pull it off you need the right tone. Try the slightly confused, 'but how can this be, there aren't any bugs in OSX, Steve Jobs said it was perfect, he wouldn't lie to me, Steve Jobs is my friend' or maybe the proud soviet citizen, 'This is a campaign of deception by those pigdogs at Microsoft, their stooges at Psystar are concocting lies against the gloriousness of OSX, all hail Steve Jobs, Glory to the Macintosh!' if your going to do a kool aid gag, you need to set up the cult follower line from the beginning. And you can never start with 'I call BS' in a funny post, start off with 'LIES!' or 'HA! they can't fool us'.
Hope this helps you get modded funny in the future.
And if that fails, just bleat the same 'soviet russia' joke every thread, remember, witless retards get mod points too.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?