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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Member since:
2006-05-26
1. On Thom's part (I didn't see it in the cnet.com posting) there's mention of expanding the PyStar box to 16 TB RAM. 16 GB RAM for currently available hardware I can see, but 16 TB? Crack smoking is going on somewhere
2. On PyStar's part, if they're actually modifying the Software Update utility as it seems to say in the article, is living dangerously from a legal standpoint by doing this. This goes outside the question of EULA's and straight into the question of copyrights. It'd at least be less risky if they merely provided instructions for how to do so, instead of actually selling it as part of the system.
I still remain convinced that it's only a matter of time before Apple terminates them either in a legal action method, or at least makes it too much of a hassle to get the latest OS versions for their hardware. It may be delayed by quite a bit, perhaps until the PR and legal costs are outweighed by the potential rewards or potential reduction of losses brought on by PyStar selling clones. I expect if they can do it by marginalizing the hardware's value via incompatible software updates, that'd be the cheapest for them, in all forms of reckoning, as it's likely to be much quieter, with only screaming coming from cheap geeks that wouldn't buy a regular Apple Mac anyway