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Apple Suit Demands That Psystar Recall OpenMacs
Da'Man writes "The Psystar saga takes another series of turns. Not only is the website down but an examination of the suit filed by Apple shows that the Cupertino Goliath wants Psystar to recall all Open Computer and OpenServ systems sold by the company since April. It seems that Steve Jobs is out to totally sink Psystar and put an end to Mac clones."
Showing a remarkably high trading value?
Yes, IBM "got out of the game". No, it was not necessarily bad for them.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
Ok, how about the thousands of us who demand a headless, non-pro, non-laptop computer, with actual desktop/decent parts in it?
Mac mini: piss-poor GPU and low-capacity/slow LAPTOP 2.5" drive in a DESKTOP computer?
iMac: fuckin' all-in-one computer with stupid glossy screens and low quality LCDs with not even average GPU choices.
Mac Pro: are you fucking insane? I don't need that much power (and even the GPU options for that one are ridiculous).
Make the Mac mini taller/bigger, put a 3.5" drive and a half-decent GPU in it (the ability to run Starcraft II and Diablo III at medium settings) and it WILL sell. A lot. You have no fuckin' idea how much people loathe all-in-one computers.
Has the price changed that much? Last I looked, Apple was actually competitive (within $100, sometimes cheaper) with commodity hardware. The only difference is, you can't get a Mac without the bells and whistles.
In other words, you get exactly what you pay for, which includes $1k of hardware you don't actually need.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
IAALS (I am a Law Student). Having worked with litigators, I can gurantee that yesterday's ruling (which actually sets almost no precedent because it relied on existing copyright doctrines despite what Slashdotters thought) had exactly 0 to do with the filing date.
I know this because:
1. If there had been any real precedent set, the litigators would have taken at least several weeks to analyze the decision, make an educated guess as to whether the decision will survive appeals, recraft the complaint, and make sure all of this was OK with the client (Apple) before proceeding. Litigation takes time.
2. The actual filing date of the lawsuit was July 3rd, and the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is strong, but it does not enable time travel.
I'll try not to pull a troll moment here either, but I don't find anything particularly innovative about either the iPhone or iPod apart from the concept of marketing high-tech to a non-geek demographic. To a massive extent that concept alone determines the direction which the technology has to follow.
If I bought something, it's now mine (the hardware anyway). I doubt Pystar can actually repossess any of the boxes. The entire demand by Apple is pretty silly. Apple's copyright claims can't possibly cover the possession of physical hardware. Very bizarre. I think Apple only has a claim against Psystar itself over copyright infringement (the distribution of hacked Apple patches). Personal use of OS X in breach of Apple's license would have to be an issue that Apple would have to deal with on a per user basis, which I doubt they are willing to do.
The only thing is, it's not really the same thing since Psystar isn't an End User. So Honda might not be able to able to make you sign an agreement saying you'll only drive on Honda approved roads (but I don't know, maybe they can?), but Honda could probably make their dealerships sign an agreement saying they won't engage in certain business practices. The analogy isn't perfect, but analogies rarely are.
Because the thing is that Psystar is installing altering the software, copying it, and then distributing the copies. Hence, this isn't an issue of EULAs, but blatant copyright infringement unless they have a license. If the EULA specifically allowed this, they could try to use the EULA to protect themselves, but the EULA makes no provisions that allow them to do this.
Of course, IANAL, so I could be wrong.
Instead of a WinMo device going into portrait mode by hitting a button or opening a slide-out keyboard, it has a tilt sensor, the Wiimote had one before the iPhone. Instead of a single touch, you can use 2 fingers, like in that Tom Cruise movie with seeing the future. Say it how it is, using terms like "multitouch" glorifies a rather arbitrary concept.
Innovation is 90% efficiency solar panels or 100 MPG cars or even the company that invented the hardware that makes multitouch work, something that doesn't exist, not utilizing things that are already available.
What Apple does is polish concepts, just like Blizzard. Blizzard didn't invent the RTS or MMO but they polished them into something really good (actually I hate WoW, but it is what it is).
I suspect Apple is every bit as evil as Microsoft, just less successful.
Suspect? Imagine a world where Apple won the PC wars rather than Microsoft. Imagine what we'd be paying for computers with only a single supplier.
Of course, if Apple *had* won, they probably would've been broken up long ago as a monopoly, but it would've set the computer industry back at least a decade.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but at least they never leveraged their OS dominance by producing a "Microsoft PC" and then "phasing out" all the other hardware manufacturers. If Steve Jobs, through some twist of fate, had been in charge of Microsoft rather than Apple when he returned, that's exactly what would've happened.
And let's not even get into the fact that Apple competes via lawsuit orders of magnitude more often than Microsoft.
Apple is *far and away* more evil than Microsoft ever dreamed of being. They're fortunately just not the dominant player.
[And no, I'm not defending whatever evil Microsoft has done, only that they are not nearly as evil as they could've been.]
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Call it what you like, but handheld multitouch is fairly novel, and the automatic screen-turning isn't too shabby either.
IIRC these ideas and more where being thrown around on the OpenMoko mailing list before the iPhone was announced.
While I'm not going to dispute Apples success in putting everything together, I find it hard to credit them with technological innovation when these ideas were being casually thrown around by a bunch of random geeks on a mailing list.
By restricting the realm of what is an Apple device, this can be seen as an attempt to guarantee consistent quality.
Precisely. Which is why I say their marketing concepts are more innovative than their tech.
Innovation is 90% efficiency solar panels or 100 MPG cars or even the company that invented the hardware that makes multitouch work...
I think that's a very limited definition of "innovation."
A better definition might be "solving a problem through the novel application of technology". The technology might be completely new, or it might be existing technology used in a new way. Either one can be innovative.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."