Zach Spear
Despite ongoing litigation, Mac cloner Psystar has introduced a new slimline tower also capable of running Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system, starting at $600.
For $599.99 customers receive a slimline tower with a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of DDR2 memory, a 500GB hard drive, and NVIDIA's GeForce 8400 GS graphics card with 256MB of video memory. FireWire does not come standard, instead requiring $79, and 802.11n wireless is another $99. A USB Bluetooth adapter costs $40 more.
Upgrade options include a 2.53 GHz Core2Quad ($180), 4GB of memory ($50), 1TB hard drive ($100), additional hard drives ($99 to $199), and a Blu-ray burner. Graphics can be bumped up to the GeForce 9500GT 512MB for $119.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, of course, comes installed. Psystar also sells an optional copy of iLife and iWork together for $59.99.
Meanwhile, the company has refreshed its Open Pro flagship to offer a rackmount version for servers ($1,155) that comes with a 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB of memory. The base tower (also $1,155) gets updated parts, including 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and NVIDIA's GeForce9500 GT video card. Upgrades are available as well.
Apple finally sued Psystar in July 2008, and the months since have seen Psystar's counterarguments get modified and the two sides agree on a protective order.
Psystar maintains Apple is misusing its copyrights by ensuring kernel panics and infinite loops on unauthorized hardware attempting to run Mac OS X. Apple contends Psystar's circumvention of its code in order to sell the machines without Apple's permission constitutes copyright violation and is seeking an order to halt Psystar's behavior.
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64 Comments
Just curious, has anyone here bought anything from Psystar yet?
I haven't bought anything from them in fear that they could go under at any minute forcing me to maintain the machine they sold me. If that's going to be the situation anyway, why not just build my own mac clone and become familiar with the process myself, and that way I don't have to pay anyone to build it for me. It's relatively easy now to build and run a mac clone, and with the refusal to offer a headless mac, it's the only solution for someone wanting more power than a mini and less power than a powermac.
They must be feeling confident and i guess life goes on and they have a business to run.
Having said that you can only poke a stick at a Leopard for so long before before it bites your arm off.
LOL, might as well i guess. Not gonna be here months from now so might as well get while the gettin is good.
I can't wait for them to disappear (this is coming from someone that builds hacks for a hobby). They are bad for apple and bad for the community. The sad thing is they didn't even innovate getting OS X to work on intel machines! LOL
They must be feeling confident and i guess life goes on and they have a business to run.
Bernie Madoff had a business to run.