People are split firmly into two camps with regards to their view of the OSX Operating system. There are those that love it and those that haven’t tried it yet.

Up until now OSX has been strictly “for Macs only” (aside from hacking around getting an illegally modified version installed on a PC), but Psystar, a Miami company, announced this week of the launch of the £200 “Open PC” that is capable of running an unmodified Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

When you compare the configuration of the OpenPC with that of a Mac Mini you find that “the Mac Mini costs 150% of the price of the OpenPC while offering poorer performance, smaller storage space, and RAM”.

Apple ran an authorized Mac clone program for a stint of about two years in the mid-to-late 90’s, but upon Steve Jobs’ return to the business this was ceased.

Following the announcement by Psystar earlier this week, their website crashed under the load. The company said its web traffic peaked at over 30,000 hits per second on Monday, causing an outage; so there’s an undoubted demand for what they are offering.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the Apple legal team respond…

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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