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PsyStar's Open Computer: the Alterna-Mac

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Jun 2008 22:13 UTC

PsyStar introduced its Mac clone to much media attention back in April, causing many discussions about the company's legal status, the validity of the Mac OS X EULA, and even PsyStar's very existence. It soon turned out PsyStar was a real company, and was actually shipping the OpenComputer Mac Clone to its customers, to generally rather favourable reviews - not stellar of course, but acceptable, with the biggest downside being the inability to use the Software Update tool, forcing users to download OS updates straight from PsyStar's servers - to prevent updates from Apple hosing the OpenComputer. We're a few months later now, and a few things have changed.

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RE: Not necessarily bad for Apple

by StephenBeDoper on Tue 24th Jun 2008 02:57 UTC in reply to "Not necessarily bad for Apple"

Member since:
2005-07-06

Firstly in the article you talk about companies putting together off-the-shelf clones to run MacOS. This is true to a certain degree - but these clones still use the same chipset, graphics sets, etc that are available in current Macs. This may change, but for the moment that means that the suggestion that Apple's claims about how they keep the system stable being untrue is itself not quite correct.

On the contrary - IMHO, it thoroughly torpedoes the argument that "Macs are less-problematic because Apple controls both the OS and the hardware". I do agree with the premise that Macs are less-problematic in terms of hardware-related problems, but it has nothing to do with Apple controlling the hardware and the software (if for no other reason that Apple actually doesn't have control over the hardware used in Macs - not beyond the choice of which third-party components to use, at least).

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