Mac Clone???

[Karl Kuehn]

On Apr 15, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Scott Roebuck wrote:

> Any thoughts?

	Pystar's "Open Computer" is a bit of a nockoff. There are a large  
number of caviets that you have to accept that I would not be  
comfortable with:

- they are not really running an EFI system, so they have it faked,  
this is going to come back and bite people (no NetBooting or NetRestore)

- they don't guarantee that this will work with any system updates,  
and seem inclined to think that general system updates will break the  
machine. I expect that they are just using the information from the  
OSx86 project, and my understanding is that they need to re-do things  
for almost every update.

- by accepting this machine with MacOS X on it you are definitely  
breaking the EULA, since this is not "Apple Branded Hardware". The  
company is talking up how they are going to stand up to Apple in  
court, but I don't think that is going to last very long.

- their definition of "equivalent computer" needs a lot of work.

- FireWire is optional (for a fee), and I am betting that you don't  
have target-disk mode. There are going to be a lot more "little"  
things along this line.

- they keep making comparisons against the Mac mini, but conveniently  
forget that the biggest advantage of the mini is that it is small,  
which a "mini-tower" is not. Re-do the comparisons against an iMac and  
make sure that you are including an OS and the equation starts to alter.

> Do you think Apple will put the kibosh on this?

	Definitely. Apple seems not to care if people do this as a hobby, but  
they take exception to people making money through it.

	It will be interesting to see the EULA in court, but the companies'  
argument that anti-trust law is going to fall flat in the face of  
Apple's market-share. Most anti-trust laws only come into effect once  
you have Monopoly status, not before.

--
		Karl Kuehn
			larkost at softhome.net