A bore is a well you wish you'd never fallen into
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Mac cloner marches on
PLUCKY LITTLE APPLE NEMESIS Psystar is apparently walking away from the latest round of legal shenanigans with the Cupertino computer company with a bloody nose, but it hasn't quite hit the canvas yet.
The Florida-based outfit, which has been poking Apple's legal team with a sharpened stick for close to two years now, once predicted that it would sell 70,000 cut-price Mac clones - complete with the latest version of OSX pre-installed - in its first year of trading.
Apple of course reserves the right to tell you exactly what you are allowed to do with its software despite the fact that you have paid good money for it, insisting that you are only allowed to use it on one of its reassuringly expensive computers.
The problem is that, since Jobs' Mob switched over to all Intel innards, it's been all too easy to shoehorn OSX into any old box of bits, much to the chagrin of the Cupertino cabal. The men in grey suits who work for the folks in black turtlenecks went after the cloners, terrified that the computer buying public could be convinced that it wasn't worth paying a premium for Apple hardware just to run its highly desirable operating system.
It now turns out that Psystar has had a few problems with production, marketing and sales, possibly because the entire staff is spending most of its time stuck in a court room, resulting in less than impressive sales of just 768 units in 2009.
Apple sold 10.4 million units in the same period, a year in which the company had its best quarter ever. We would love to know how many dollars Apple's legal team burned on attempting to prevent the sale of each of those 768 machines. And like some other commentators, we would love to know who is really bankrolling Psystar. That's a company that seems to all intents and purposes to have been created just to annoy Steve Jobs and his minions.
The latest round in the ongoing battle has seen a tentative settlement with Apple winning the fight to prevent Psystar from pre-installing Snow Leopard on its Apple-apeing hardware, but that doesn't stop Psystar from supplying users with an install disk and asking them to do the work themseleves, apparently. When you consider that Snow Leopard is probably the simplest to install OS ever made (double click the installer icon, lie about having read the EULA, go and have a cup of tea and a snack), then - if this legal settlement really is what has been reported so far - it's a hollow victory for Apple.
It would also appear from some reports that Psystar has managed to prevent Apple from putting an end to it selling its OSX bootloader application, Rebel EFI, which for $50 will get Snow Leopard up and running on a huge range of non-fruity Intel-based PC hardware.
It seems that Psystar is circumventing some of Apple's corporate might by insisting that its customers are not using their Hackintoshes for commercial purposes, but the fight's not over yet. Watch this space. µ
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It's better than my old Windows phone mostly because HTC has put their own GUI on it.
Apple hardware, yeah I have seen some Apple certified graphics cards. These same cards cost £80 for a pc (ATI 4850) or £270 for a Mac, even though it's the same hardware. LMAO. The most reliable thing about that Apple graphics card is that the buyers have more money than sense and hand it over easily. ;-)
There lies the problem the majority of users are uneducated and computer use should be like getting a drives license.
Just like by learning the rules of the road you avoid accidents, there is an etiquette that one follows to not have your computer crash because of a virus.
Saying that Mac's are immune to hardware and software failures is a lie and you my friend are feeding Pinocchio.
I have been a PC user since 1991, prior to that i used a PPC based Commodore.
I'm not your average user but when you are too lazy to read what it says above the OK button, you have no one to blame but yourself.
fair point man I don't disagree with you in the whole, but the majority of non tech savy PC users (and that's most of the planet) haven't got a clue. All my clients are in big, well funded business and the amount of times I have had them on the phone saying a project is on hold because their laptop has been eaten by a virus or their desktop is dead for some reason is shocking.
I'm not saying that a good PC is not as good as a mac but there are a HUGE amount of very poorly made PC's out there that people use day in day out and it shows unfortunately. This tied to users either not being supported by IT dept.s or not taking responsibility for their own kit makes for an unhappy ride for a lot of people.
As for reliability, in just over 15 years I have not had a bad mac yet (Touch wood), I have had 2 bad Dells towers, one bad Philips tower, 3 bad non branded towers and one bad Dell lappy. That's just personal experience, the money I pay for a mac more than makes up for the pain and discomfort of that kind of hardware experience. :)
Seriously, mac hardware and software more reliable? I used to own macs when the hardware was ppc, but now I build my own, and trust me, I choose components that are every bit as good, if not better than what apple sells. And as for the software, Photoshop works just as well for me on a winpc as a macpc, so I must disagree with your assertion that a macpc is more reliable. As for downtime, none for me, and viruses... I don't surf porn or sketchy sites on my work pc and oddly enough have not gotten any viruses.
And the best part, saved myself a ton of cash.
Psystar are tossers period.
They know what they are doing is illegal and that it infringes copyright. They have THE shittiest customer support which in its self points to a shady company. They bounced numbers around about how many units they would shift and by all accounts they have moved a tiny fraction of that AND struggle to support even those!!! Anyone supporting these cowboys needs their heads checking.
One of the very positive aspects (and there are people who will fall either side of this) of owning a mac is that it is a tight, controlled system. Yeah, it has its faults but as a professional user of their software and machines it's a life saver. No downtime, no viruses, reliable hardware/software compared to windows systems (in general) and customer support from the people responsible for making/writing/reselling it. I feel a lot happier working like this.
Psystar is like buying a rolex from a man in a car at a service station, sounds like a good idea at the time because it's such a deal but wait till you get home...
everything is out of stock on their website.
I have nothing but contempt for steve jobs as soon as I read him claim to have invented the GUI.
the weezel then claimed he ment to say "the apple gui"
If Apple thought it could make more money by selling the Mac OS X operating system to generic hardware manufacturers (eg Dell), Apple would have done so. It tried licensing once before, and lost money doing it.
I'm not necessarily condoning Apple's actions, but you can see that Apple does this to survive.
Look at the mobile smartphone handset market. Nobody can make money by selling an OS to hardware manufacturers. Microsoft failed in this market. Google gives away its Android OS.
In both desktop and mobile handsets, Apple needs to couple its OS sale to the hardware sale to make money. It can't sell the OS on its own.
Microsoft gets away with selling its desktop Windows, by sheer numbers and quantity. But that will also one day fail, as it failed with Windows on phones, which nobody wants.
But, I'm interested to see what Psystar does next. Apple could claim that the customer pays for OS X in the hardware purchase, and that the boxed OS X is merely an upgrade. Therefore, it could be argued, that Psystar is effectively using its bootloader application, Rebel EFI, to allow people to pay only the upgarde price for OS X, and not the full price.
What would peoples' reactions be if someone marketed a $50 application that could convert an upgrade version of Adobe Photoshop into the full version, so you didn't have to pay full price? Same thing, isn't it?
I've long enjoyed the Apple computers that I've purchased, going all the way back to the late 1980's. Increasingly, however, I've become both disappointed and annoyed with Apple's tactics and that Bete-noire of a CEO (whose own know-it-all arrogance nearly cost him his life when he told his doctors he could cure his cancer holistically - we all know how that worked out!)
To my mind, Psystar provides a service that is illegal only by questionable interpretations of American anti-trust law, in particular, provisions that forbid the tying of property protected by patent and.or copyright (i.e., Max OS X) to items that are not (i.e., generic x86 hardware, and yes it is generic regardless of it;s gussied up unibody case). The fact that a Federal Court judge bought Apple's motion for summary judgment was to ve expected, given that most District Court judges are Bush appointees. The fact that Apple has moved its "highly desirable" OS to generic hardware shouldn't really matter. Nor should the fact that Apple's margin would take quite a hit had Psystar won. What counts is the enforcement of the law which is designed to reward a company for its technological advances and not devious business practices. One can only hope that Psystar continues in business in the sale of Mac OS capable computers sans the OS.