Would-be Mac clone maker Psystar raises many questions

“Though the blogging frenzy over whether would-be Mac clone maker Psystar is real has died down in the past few days, no one has determined the truth beyond the shadow of a doubt,” David Zeiler blogs for The Baltimore Sun.

“After a series of crazy developments last week, including an address that changed several times within a few days and a credit card payment company that abruptly terminated its relationship with Psystar, many in the Mac blogosphere declared the upstart company a hoax,” Zeiler writes.

“But over the weekend and into Monday, defenders of Psystar attributed its troubles to poor planning. They argued that the fledgling company had failed to anticipate the huge demand for cheap Mac clones they faced when news of Psystar hit the Web 10 days ago,” Zeiler writes. “Psystar posted reassuring messages on its Web site. A Friday item headlined ‘Store up and running, orders shipped’ promised that orders placed in the first week at Psystar’s online store would be shipped starting this week. On Tuesday, Psystar posted a message and photo trumpeting its new headquarters (independently verified by several news sites).”

“The ultimate proof would come when customers began to receive their orders; I have yet to read of a Psystar machine successfully delivered, but the first shipments might not arrive for a few days,” Zeiler writes.

“Even if Psystar is legit, what it is doing – selling PC boxes capable of running the Mac operating system without Apple’s blessing – raises many other questions,” Zeiler writes.

Full article here.

36 Comments

  1. that were true, my myth-busting friend! Rest assured there were hardware problems galore with the clones, though to be fair those were the days of scsi chains etc. and that was a lot more common in general. Nearly all of the motherboards in Macs these days are extremely customized though, it really IS about the whole widget–it is all so well integrated-software and hardware, even if many user changeable components are identical to other machines. Have you ever taken apart a Mac Mini or an Air or an iMac? To say that there’s no difference in the hardware makes me think the answer is ‘no’. You can’t get these babies at Radio Shack, bud. These are the things that make a Mac a Mac.

  2. if the clones were as bad as you say why did jobs have to kill the clones by canceling license agreements? wouldn’t the aggravation of dealing with an obstinate clone been enough to kill the clones? wouldn’t public sentiment against the clone be enough to cause mac users to run back to apple?

    no, jobs had to kill the clones because he had no choice. angry and startled stockholders and falling profits were clear evidence that clones were, in fact, killing macs.

    it wasn’t clone failures and frustrations that led to their demise, it was steve jobs yanking the plug of licensing the mac os to save his ass.

  3. what? no feeble fanboi response? no clever words from the mdn morons? how’s it feel to see recorded history destroy yer pathetic imaginations? reality distortion, yeah, the truth is too much for fanbois.

    remove yer heads from yer asses, clean the crap from yer eyes, and swab the shit from yer ears, it’s steve jobs, his steveness, breaking the news of how he desperately killed the clones.

  4. here’s more, morons, fanbois, and computer degnerates.

    http://www.macworld.com/article/133189/2008/04/mwvodcast48.html
    imagine that, os x running on off the shelf parts. damn! the myth that apple is the only company that has the “know how” to build mac is a complete farce. the whole widget, ha. you believed a lie.

    i love that fact that macworld, yes, m-a-c-world, is pulling back the curtain of the great oz, I mean, great jobs.

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