Mac or Hack?

[#1]

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

[#2]

Quite a quagmire is manifesting itself as a result of this new 'product' - Engadget's got an interesting update here.

[#3]

The Guardian have done an investigatory piece on this: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/04/15/so_exactly_who_or_what_is_psystar_we_dig_a_little.html Gizmodo even took the time to send the boys round... http://gizmodo.com/380488/psystar-exposed-looks-like-a-hoax Matt

[#4]

As a bit of a mac fanboy i love the idea that there might well be a cheap alternative to apple systems because when i gave up Pc's i did it for the os and not the hardware however the quality of os looks amazing on their machines. I have both a Macbook (Feb08) and iMac (Sept07) and my confidence in windows has gone further downhill with vista so Microsofts future is questionable, especially if Psystar begin manufacturing cheap macs others will follow.

[#5]

"when i gave up Pc’s i did it for the os and not the hardware"

But surely the OS is more stable, at least in part, because the hardware configuration is so tightly controlled.