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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...
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
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
While I appriciate the reference, I must point out that in point of fact, Apple would completely go against the spirit of Rapture, and thus Andrew Ryan wouldn't stand for it.
Rapture was all about unbound advancements and collaberation. Apple's insular policies would have them kneecapped before they even started.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
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.
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.
yeah cloning IBM hardware at 30% profit (instead of more), worked out soooo badly for dell & co!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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 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.
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.
You don't read very carefully do you? He didn't insinuate that the commission discriminates...
Yes he did.
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.
That would be discrimination.
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.
You don't have any idea what you're talking about.
Now you need "anti competitive behavior".
You've always needed anti-competitive behavior since having a monopoly has never been illegal in and of itself, although certain methods of acquiring them have been forbidden.
A feature of the anti competitive behavior criteria is that government may apply it to competitors that aren't the monopolist.
You're full of it. There are weaker consumer protection laws that apply to companies that are not monopolists (or part of a trust), but those aren't anti-trust laws. I also don't know of any that apply here.
Apple is behaving anti-competitively in this case by restricting aftermarket modifications of their software.
Umm, isn't that a prime function of copyright law, to prevent alteration and redistribution of copyrighted material like OS X?
A car company wouldn't succeed in similarly restricting aftermarket modifications.
A car isn't copyrighted intellectual property. Your analogy is fundamentally broken.
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
looloolooLook at you, Psystar. A papa--pathetic company of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you r-run through my lawsuits. hoHow can you challenge a perfect, immortal Maaaac?
Better?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
A car isn't copyrighted intellectual property. Your analogy is fundamentally broken.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this one is wrong - a specific make and model of car is an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. There is a copyright on each individual car.
Technically, aside from the design patents, Ford could also be sued for copyright infringement if they made a Fordota Famry that was nigh-indistinguishable from a Toyota Camry, or a FUMMER that was a derivative work of a HUMMER. But it would be a tough case, since any changes under the hood would likely make the new car original enough.
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.
Text wall of fail.
"Meanwhile nobody supports you and the Netbook market has seen a nearly decade old MSFT OS kick the living snot out of brand new Linux distros."
The Netbook concept has been around awhile, the market is only 2 years old at best. It doesn't kick the snot out of any brand new Linux distro, it proves that the best OS they have is still only XP which is sad. And to upgrade from it, you need a more powerful machine than a netbook and generally to PAY for the upgrade.
I'm sorry, but those Linux netbooks are pushing a realm of support unheard of. It's easier to get support to run things. And yes, for most of us, it is much more convenient that I can go to the Ubuntu forums and get community support for my Netbook from other users. Failing that, the netbooks are supported by their manufacturers and I can assure you they accept support phone calls and won't tell you to "google" drivers, they will tell you where to get them.
Just because you're shortsited, stuck up, stubborn and ignorant, doesn't make you right. Stop spreading your misinformation and lies.
You're right. If you go out and buy those things without doing any research, they won't work on Linux. Of course, they won't work on a Macintosh either. So, I guess Macintosh isn't ready for the desktop yet as well?
I went to Best Buy.com and picked the first of each that came up. The printer (Epson PictureMate Dash) probably would have worked on a Mac and maybe would have worked on Ubuntu (the flavor of Linux I use). Without buying it, I can't tell for sure, but the information I found online seemed to show that it would. Neither the wifi card I chose or the TV tuner supported Linux, but then they didn't support Mac OSX either.
So because hardware manufacturers don't support Mac OSX it just isn't ready for the average user?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
While I agree with the rest of your post, this one is wrong - a specific make and model of car is an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. There is a copyright on each individual car.
I do not believe you are correct. Here's an excerpt from an explanation of copyright law which uses an automobile as an example of what cannot be copyrighted:
Copyright protection is generally not available to articles which have a utilitarian function. Examples of these types of "useful articles" would include lamps, bathroom sinks, clothing, and computer monitors. Under the Copyright Act, the only copyright protection available to these items is for "features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article." Unfortunately, this test is inherently ambiguous when deciding the scope of copyright protection for certain useful articles.
Some distinctions are clear. For instance, a painting on the side of a truck is protectable under copyright law even though the truck is a useful article. The painting is clearly separable from the utilitarian aspects of the truck. The overall shape of the truck, on the other hand, would not be copyrightable since the shape is an essential part of the truck's utility. Another commonly considered example is that of clothing. The print found on the fabric of a skirt or jacket is copyrightable, since it exists separately from the utilitarian nature of the clothing. However, there is no copyright in the cut of the cloth, or the design of the skirt or jacket as a whole, since these articles are utilitarian. This is true even of fanciful costumes; no copyright protection is granted to the costume as a whole.
Does that make sense to you or do you have some citation that indicates this is no longer true?
Technically, aside from the design patents, Ford could also be sued for copyright infringement if they made a Fordota Famry that was nigh-indistinguishable from a Toyota Camry
I think you're confusing copyright with trademark. In the above case Ford could be sued for trademark violation for making a product confusingly similar to Toyota's "Camry" trademark.
... Under the Copyright Act, the only copyright protection available to these items is for "features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article."
That'd be the part I'm referring to - the purely aesthetic aspects of the car that serve no functional purpose. This was intentional in the copyright act to prevent from giving patent holders a lifetime monopoly - but you can't get a utility patent on the nonfunctional stuff, so there's not an inconsistency.
For example, you can copyright architectural plans, but you can't copyright the idea of a building. But even if you don't put them in blueprints, the copyrightable architectural plans can be "fixed in a tangible medium" - namely, the building itself.
Technically, aside from the design patents, Ford could also be sued for copyright infringement if they made a Fordota Famry that was nigh-indistinguishable from a Toyota Camry
I think you're confusing copyright with trademark. In the above case Ford could be sued for trademark violation for making a product confusingly similar to Toyota's "Camry" trademark.
No - was trying to refer to Ford making an identical looking car to a Camry. My play on the names was an effort to capture that intention, but it apparently fell short. :)
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.
Is 9.04 new enough for you? Take the hairyfeet challenge if you think I am full of shit. It will only take a few minutes of your time and proof my point beyond a shadow of a doubt. Go to Staples.com, Bestbuy.com, and Walmart.com. Now put the three things I am going to list WITHOUT doing research first. Remember, you are a home consumer who has walked into these stores to buy the listed items. Home users do not do research, and you are deluding yourself if you think they do. Ready? Here goes-an all in one printer, a USB Wifi stick, and a USB TV Tuner. I have chosen these three things because as someone who works retail I can tell you that along with webcams these are the three most popular purchases. Now you can choose the first one you see, or the cheapest of each, but remember-NO RESEARCH-because home users don't do research before purchases.
Now that you have three tabs open in your browser, with the above items in your cart from the three stores, go to whichever distro you use, from your post I would say Ubuntu, and see if the above devices work. Go ahead, I'll wait. They don't work, do they? In fact i'm willing to bet my last dollar that without doing research(which is a dealbreaker for home users) that you have ZERO PERCENT chance of getting the above items without getting burned by at least one, most likely all three, not having any Linux support AT ALL. And THIS ladies and gentlemen is why Ubuntu and any other Linux isn't ready for home users. Because home users aren't going to do research before purchasing anything that costs less than a car. Geeks do research, home users just walk into a store and buy. But Linux support for home gear is frankly so piss poor that I would be amazed if 10% of the merchandise in the above stores, three of the largest retailers in America, work at all. If you can't even shop at the biggest retail chains in the USA without spending hours on forums, how do you expect the home users will fare?
Look, you have two niches where Linux frankly kicks ass-the server and the enterprise markets. It kicks ass there because major corps like Red Hat spend the big bucks for drivers to make DAMNED SURE that all the hardware "just works" out of the box. So be happy already. You have two niches where the support contracts are fat and the users are educated, often with lots if IT experience. This lowers your support costs and makes Linux easy to deal with in those areas. But please don't delude yourself into thinking that because you are good at these two niche markets that it means Linux is ready for home users, because it is just fantasy. Your support for consumer gear just stinks. I'm sorry, but it does. Then add in the fact that you often have to go CLI to fix even little problems like incorrect resolution on your monitor, or having to edit config files( Which Windows hasn't had to do since Win95) and if you are honest with yourself you will realize that for home users, who see a PC as an appliance and have NO DESIRE to learn CLI or arcane Unix commands, it isn't ready.
In 15 years of PC work I have had to go CLI on Windows less than 5 times. How many times did you have to use CLI to set up your Ubuntu install? How many times have you gone CLI in the past six months? If the answer is even one your OS isn't ready for home users. Sorry, but it is a fact. But don't shoot the messenger just because you don't like the message, prove it to yourself,take the hairyfeet challenge. Go to the above websites and shop. Or write down every time you go CLI on a new Ubuntu install. And you will see just as I have that Linux simply isn't ready for the masses. It has support for too few items of consumer gear, it is way too reliant on CLI and editing config files, and most consumer gear has NO support at all. I'm sorry, but that is why ASUS is dropping you, and why MSI is seeing 400% return rates on their Linux laptops. Because marketing Linux to home users is foolish. That is why Dell has the Linux laptops tucked away in the business section instead of the front page. I'm sorry if this makes you unhappy, but it is the truth. Make at least 80% of the gear in the above stores work and ASUS and Dell will sell your OS to home users. Until then, even at $0.00 dollars your OS simply isn't worth the trouble.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.