Psystar delivers Hackintosh
28 Apr 2008 | 12:48 BST
Just the one
CLONE WARS company Psystar seems to have at least one happy customer. An anonymous poster on a Gizmodo forum reckons he's had his box... and he's delighted with it:
I posted this yesterday in one of the older Psystar threads, but no one noticed. So far I haven’t seen any other comments by people who’ve ordered and received a computer from Psystar so I’ll stick my neck out once again.
Just so you know I ordered on April 10th, several days before the news
broke about these guys supposedly being shady scamsters.
I got mine today and it’s awesome. Leopard preinstalled and included
(still in shrink wrap) Core2Duo 2.66 w/4gigs of ram and a Geforce 8600GT w/256
mb ram. Everything as advertised. Clocked a very respectable 3585 on Geekbench.
Plus I got 3 calls from Psystar:
1. to let me know it had shipped.
2. to let me know UPS got it here a day early and it was on the truck for
delivery.
3. to follow up and make sure I got everything and was happy with the
machine.
The reader then updated his post the next day:
I used this machine all day today at work without a hiccup. So far everything is working perfectly (something I can’t say about my G5 it’s replacing) Photoshop, Firefox, VMware Fusion (I know…ironic) as well as the OS itself all performed as expected.
These guys may have made some mistakes, and are obviously treading on very thin ice regarding Apple’s EULA, but they ARE shipping plain vanilla PC’s that run OS 10.5.2 like a champ.
Obviously one happy customer does not a viable business make, and it remains to be seen whether Apple will allow these young scamps to ride roughshod over its EULA, but we remain optimistic that this can only be good news for OSX fans. But only if you are happy working under the hood of your Hackintosh.
There is another fly in the OS ointment. The clone machines will not be able to support Apple's Software Update feature, meaning average users will struggle to keep the OS and any Apple software up to date.
The only way to update the system is by some reasonably complex command-line jiggery pokery developed my the OSX86 community (which has its collective panties in a bunch about Psystar nicking its code without premission).
Indeed, Psystar itself has admitted that anyone wanting to re-install OSX, after a hard drive failure, for example, needs to return the box to base and stump up $50 to have it fixed (plus the cost of a new hard drive in all likelihood).
And don't think you'll be able to phone Apple for support, even though you've paid for a retail copy of its operating system. The first thing they'll ask you for is the serial number of the machine on which the OS is installed.
Not one of ours? Bye bye! µ
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