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Mac Clone Maker Psystar Files For Bankruptcy
StikyPad was one of several readers letting us know that Psystar has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. We've discussed the Mac clone maker's battles with Apple extensively. The company apparently has over $250,000US in debt, and states that it cannot turn a profit in the current economy. "The Chapter 11 filing will temporarily suspend Apple's copyright infringement suit against Psystar, which is currently before the US District Court of Northern California. But once the bankruptcy protection is sorted out, the copyright case will resume." And PC Mag is reporting that, on the other side of the Atlantic, two new clone companies are just getting started. Like PsyStar, FreedomPC and RussianMac promise to deliver PCs with OS X preloaded.
Windows just isn't ready for the desktop yet. It may be ready for the coasters that you nerds use to sit your colas on, but the average computer user isn't going to spend hours in the dos cli configuring irq numbers and io addresses, dealing with constant crashes and manually installing networking support just so they can get a workable graphic interface to check their mail with, especially not when they already have a free alternative that works perfectly well and is backed by major corporations like Redhat and Canonical, as opposed to Windows which is only supported by Microsoft. The last thing I want is a chair-flinging gorilla (haha) providing me my OS.
No really raise your hand who didn't see that coming from a lightyear away.
It's funny - a company like Microsoft has built its entire fortune on the idea of licensing software rather than selling it.
You'd expect them to be supporting Apple in this lawsuit to enforce their EULA... yet they're not...
Hm.
The company apparently has over $250,000US in debt.
That must be a typo - could they mean $ 250 million USD ? Most companies would not
choke on $ 250,000 worth of debt.
Why would anyone want to run Mac OS on unsupported hardware? It's going to be unstable, missing features, and chances are that getting updates from Apple to install with or without hosing your installation is going to be a bitch.
If you want OS X that bad why not just buy a Mac?
Clearly they only have one chance left to survive. They must clone Steve Jobs!
Until out of chapter 11.
Once Apple introduces chip-level DRM, all of this goes away.
I think it's only a matter of time, if these kind of companies keep cropping up.
Think: PA Semi.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I for one welcome our new cloned overlords...
-- Sig under construction...
...instead of repurposing other peoples', they'd still be in business. That would have required some actual thought and skill and creativity, though, so I guess Psystar was boned either way. No big loss.
Let's see Apple try to sue them. Jobs will get whacked on the way to the Moscow courthouse.
This is a shame, as I was really anticipating the upcoming release of the PsyBook Wheel
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
That is the biggest question. They couldn't undercut Apple in the market segment which could mean that Apple's are well priced for what they have to offer? Too little people interested in non-Apple Mac products which could mean that they didn't offer the same service as Apple does or their products were of lower quality? Or did their management just drink all profits that should've been used to expand the company and pay for in-house lawyers?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I am Steve Jobs and I am here to ask you a question:
Is a man not entitled to his own computer?
No, says the man in Washington; it belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican; it belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow; it belongs to everyone.
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...
Apple.
The article mentions the question of who provided funding for Psystar and that the answers should come out in the bankruptcy. It will be interesting to see if the Microsoft, etc. conspiracy rumors around Psystar are validated.
It occurs to me that Apple is facing a problem with these clone makers that is similar to the problem the content industries are facing with piracy. Some fraction (obviously not all) of people who pirate content do it because they want the content but can't get it the way that they want (on the device of their choice, for example). People who buy from the Apple clone makers have a similar motivation. They want OS X, but Apple won't provide it on the type of computer that they want.
I can't help but wonder if the solution for Apple and the content industries is similar. Give people willing to pay for your product what they want. I'm not suggesting that Apple should support OS X on random PCs, nor that they should sanction the clone manufacturers, but that they should expand their line of hardware to offer more choices to consumers instead of trying to force people into the few options Apple currently provides. That might take some support away from the clone makers and make Apple more money as well. Certainly they're not going to make much money suing these companies into the ground.
Basically it boils down to this (As a prepare to build my hackintosh, parts in the mail),
I can get a great tower computer with lots of expandability for $1100 (Includes the cost of the OS). To get an equally expandable tower from apple (with room for more than 1 hard drive) would cost me $2500. The larger and growing larger hole in the mac lineup is the tower. as an apple investor I find it inexcusable.
For me its this or a windows box, both have the tools for my photography and programming.
.
. . . if I owe a bank $250 million, the bank has a problem.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Mac clone companies will never make it. Macs are over priced, but people pay that premium because they want an Apple product. Apple and it's products are in line with the Fashion industry. They are stylish to have.
To have a clone Mac is like someone buying a watch (or hand bag) off the street vendors in New York, except you don't even get the Mac logo that tells everyone how cool you are because you own a Mac. :D
This is a point worth considering. A similarly important point, where is the money coming from for the non-U.S.clones?
The most simple explanation is $250,000 in debt happens very quickly once the lawyers bills start hitting the books
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This is likely a ploy to now turn around and sue apple for damages in an anti trust lawsuit...
I somehow doubt this is the end.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see anything exciting about another x86 box that is hacked to run OS X86. A PowerPC machine, on the other hand, would be nice even without the Mac bit.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Know what's going to happen if Apple can't stop people from selling clones with MacOS on them?
Maybe they'll leave the Intel platform entirely. Maybe they'll switch to ARM, maybe to some other chip.
Or, maybe they'll make sure MacOS requires some sort of "trusted computing platform" nonsense laced throughout the entire software stack, so that it's really impossible to run the software directly on a system without hardware support for DRM (which would mean running it on a VM that emulated that would be a clear case of circumvention as the DMCA discusses).
But they're not going to tolerate this, and if they can't stop it legally, they'll stop it by some other mechanism.
If they can't beat their competitors in the marketplace, they'll sue them into oblivion.
Apple customer and/or people with interest in OSX fall into these categories
Creative professionals who use Apple because clone PC manufacturers products are an amalgamate of lowest bidder parts and software and they perform as such
Wealthy elitist pricks who will pay any price for something to differentiate themselves from the underclass
and then you have the geeks who want to make a Hackintosh for.. well this is slashdot i dont need to explain that one but i think its useful to mention these guys can sniff out there own hardware is skip paying the middle man
suffice to say there are no markets for companies
and yet still at the end of the day actual useable Hackintosh boxes are few and far between I've seen them have serious problems like incompatable power management that can fry hardware
Does anyone agree that Hackintosh cheapens the experience though? I lust for the day i have a Octo-core PowerMac with 16gigs of ram 16terrabytes of RAID and Logic Studio 8 at my beck and call
You can build a Hackintosh yourself. Bootloaders and such are out there - you can run Leopard on a regular PC, as long as you are careful to only use supported components. Amazingly enough, Apple has been remarkably nonchalant about this. So why do they have such a big problem with Psystar?
Running OSX on a white-box PC takes technical know-how and a willingness to put up with some level of brokenness. This is the polar opposite of 99.9% of Mac buyers, who want their computer to just work - that's why they bought a Mac in the first place. So Hackintoshes do not meaningfully decrease Mac sales - indeed, they might even (very) slightly increase Mac sales because they get people invested in the Mac ecosystem. (Once you've wrangled with getting OSX to run on your white-box PC, only to have to do it again for the next point update, the convenience of a real Mac starts looking like a pretty darn good upgrade.)
The problem with Psystar is that they were promising to make their white-box Mac clones easy to maintain, thus destroying the selling point of a real Mac.
The larger and growing larger hole in the mac lineup is the tower. as an apple investor I find it inexcusable.
The tower is in its last days as a mass market product. Too much space. Too much power. Too much weight.
About the DIY hacker in their mom's basement. Those people are not a threat to the Apple brand and their reputation as a hardware supplier -Psystar is. If you want to built a hackintosh yourself, you do it knowing full well that what you are doing is illegal -from a EULA standpoint. But, chances are good that someone technically proficient enough to pull it off, will not be calling Apple for support.
Sig this!
I'm just waiting for some Chinese motherboard manufacturer to quietly clone a Mac motherboard (CPU, sound, NIC, video, TPM, EFI, etc) but just sell it as a PC, and not tell anyone that it will take Mac OS without any hacking.
Just let the public quietly figure it out.
I saw this coming when mac went Intel over PPC. There's no way it's going to stop. There's too much money to be made selling cheap Macs. I'm only surprised that it took this long for it to start to take off. A decent, easy to use Unix OS on cheap hardware with plenty of commercial applications available. It had to happen. I don't see them going back to PowerPC either. I think that bridge burned.
Maybe people pay for the Apple premium by choice compared to the average user who gets a PC because of money? Or, is it because the Apple model doesn't trip and fall nearly as much as the windows model?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj3vIxM2jH8
Or, is it that the multi-trip-and-fall-model-business-model is so funny that users pay for the premium to laugh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj3vIxM2jH8
(laugh!)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
While I wouldn't argue that some people buy Apple machines because they're "stylish", the vast majority of people I know buy them because they are simply more productive using them. My mom and aunts like them because of the iLife apps (iPhoto and iMovie in particular), and me and most of my developer friends like them because of their versatility (what other brand of machine can easily run Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux?).
Not that it really matters, I suppose, but the claims on /. that Apple machines are about style only are getting a bit old by now.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Isn't it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground,
You in mid-air.
Send in the clones.
Isn't it bliss?
Don't you approve?
One who keeps tearing around,
One who can't move.
Where are the clones?
Send in the clones.
Just when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No one is there.
Don't you love farce?
My fault I fear.
I thought that you'd want what I want.
Sorry, my dear.
But where are the clones?
Quick, send in the clones.
Don't bother, they're here.
Isn't it rich?
Isn't it queer,
Losing my timing this late
In my career?
And where are the clones?
There ought to be clones.
Well, maybe next year.
I have a 2.9Ghz AMD X2 / 4GB ram / Nvidia 7600 system that triple boots Ubuntu, Windows 7, and 10.5.7.
It probably cost me $500 to build, and I can run final cut, iphoto, logic, windows gaming, and do all the Linux dev stuff. All on the same desktop machine which is upgradeable. :)
You don't read very carefully do you? He didn't insinuate that the commission discriminates, merely that the case would involve a native company and a foreign company. An EU company obviously has political channels not available to foreign companies. A major company like Apple has considerable resources to buy the same sort of access, at higher cost, but even that doesn't always work.
A monopoly is judged based upon various criteria : Originally merely being massively larger than the 2nd biggest competitor sufficed, but IBM & others weaseled their way out from under that trusty criteria. Now you need "anti competitive behavior". A feature of the anti competitive behavior criteria is that government may apply it to competitors that aren't the monopolist.
Apple is behaving anti-competitively in this case by restricting aftermarket modifications of their software. A car company wouldn't succeed in similarly restricting aftermarket modifications.
a midrange Mac is needed as the mac pro is one with about a $1000-$1500 over price with a low end video card and lacking ram.
Why not just get an efi-x module..?
I have one in my ep45ds3r - running OSX natively.
OSX and a quadcore, on a motherboard that supports up to 16gb of ram.. :)
And when Vista was less than a year old, IT wasn't ready for the desktop either?
This is the result of applying your metric to real windows systems in real life in the same way as you wish to apply them to Linux
There was reverse engineering to make their BIOS work with Mac OS. That kills the DMCA claim, since it doesn't hold for interoperability.
The reverse engineering means that there was no copyright problems (PJ still doesn't get that this is the same method as Samba and the original Compaq clone that were A-OK in the past used).
They don't agree as an End User to the license of you want to take that they are producers, so the license talk was bollocks.
That clause is unconscionable and unenforceable anyway.
What else did Apple have?
Bugger all.
Big company files a lawsuit against a little company. That lawsuit ultimately results (almost always) in the little company going bankrupt trying to defend itself.
The only thing new here is that it is Apple playing the role of 800lb gorilla.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Seriously, none of what you have to say has been true for at least 2 or 3 years now, maybe longer.
If you buy the right hardware, you never need to touch a command line. The same can be said for Windows as well where you cannot just grab a piece of hardware and expect it to work with the OS. I know for a fact this is true of nForce2 and Vista and is a huge reason why I switched over to Linux where it worked out of the box.
The irony here is that Intel/IBM/Microsoft are a success because someone got away with cloning the PC's BIOS or original operations ROM and/pr programming "toolbox" (I think?)... while the Apple company may have have a superior computer, OS, and a nice friendly PR but made computers few of us could afford because nobody was able to get away with reverse-engineering them.
The clone wars have begun!