Do you remember the Psystar saga? The attack of the clones from Open Tech? Well, to make a longer story short, here's the resume: since Apple decided to switch from the PowerPC architecture to Intel's Core Duo processors, building a Mac OS X-compatible computer became something accessible to the average Joe, and some people even thought setting up a company to manufacture and sell Mac clones can bring them some cash into the pockets, while escaping Apple's revenge. Guess what? They were wrong!
Just as a side note - Open Tech, the other clone maker I mentioned above, is completely out. The news came up yesterday, but since this was the expected outcome of the Open Tech vs Apple match, I skipped telling you about it. Well, today is the right time to quote Elijah Samaroo, Open Tech's president of online sales an PR, who wrote in an email that "Open Tech is For sale. This includes all trade secrets and brand equity. Thank you for tour [sic] time." Heh, it seems he was in a hurry to write that, don't you agree? Well, if you have $50,000 to throw away, you can go ahead and purchase Open Tech, but now, let's get back to Psystar, shall we?
Getting back to Psystar, I like them because they have a decent website, a well chosen name, since it appears as first result in Google, and let's not forget about Psystar.com vs some-free-hosting-site-you-won't-ever-remember, for Open Tech. Now, Psystar is turning defense into offense, filing a countersuit in which they accuse Apple of unfairly squeezing out its rivals! I hate fakes and clones of various products, but I must admit these guys have guts(anyway, they are not manufacturing "iMoc" or "MocBook Pra" computers)!
Even more, on the 13th of August, they posted the following on their website:"Recently, our sales team has received several inquiries as to whether or not our systems are still available. Psystar is definitely still shipping Open Computing products and we've introduced our restore utilities to enhance the computing experience for our customers at no extra cost. We strive to provide the best computers we possibly can and are actively improving all of our products taking all your valuable feedback into consideration." Their restore utilities also include a Leopard restore disk, just so that you know...
In an interview with CNET, Psystar's chief Rudy Pedraza said "What we want to do is to provide an alternative, an option. It's not that people don't want to use Mac OS, many people are open to the idea, but they're not used to spending an exorbitant amount of money on something that is essentially generic hardware." Sounds fair to me - after all, they are not really selling "Mac clones," but simply "computers capable of running Mac OS X," and nothing more.
Anyway, I am sure Apple doesn't have the same opinion as I do, so I must ask you - what do you think about this whole "Mac cloning" deal? Why would you buy such a computer(or not)?
i-Files, on August 28, 2008
[...] get that deep into Apple's legal battles, because that would take ages. Anyway, while the recent clone wars are showing Apple as a company trying to hang to some of its rather communist Terms of Service, and [...]