Notes on life, art, photography and technology, by a Danish dropout bohemian.
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
OpenMac
It seems the ill-fated Mac clones are back, though not, I guess, with Apple sanction.
So now you can run Windoze on a Mac, and you can run Mac OS X on a PC. It's a brave new cross-platform world.
I am guessing many will be interested in this machine because it's more expandable than a Mac Mini, and even cheaper. Psystar is not shy about it.
I wonder how Apple will respond to this, since it apparently uses the real Mac OS X, and Apple has said: "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac". (Apparently it's called an "Apple Mac" now, it used to be only douches who used that term instead of "Macintosh".) Related article.
Michael Burton inserts:
The company claiming to make this Mac clone seems a little fishy.
Nice refridgerator, why does it have 3 freezer compartments?
ReplyDeleteWell, it does look like one!
As the saying goes... you get what you pay for. I doubt a mac clone would have the same Macintosh elegance of design inside and out.
ReplyDeleteLysa
I remember my first Power Mac. You had to pull the power supply out to get to the main board. It was pain in the .... but it was nice to have a 601 processor. A few weeks later my boss got the newer power mac with the 602 processor. That thing unfolded like a starched napkin, and the internal layout was really clean and elegant, really, you only had to press one button and the whole thing was open.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking about my first powerbook earlier today, it had a nice docking station too, slide the laptop in like a drawer and it hooked up ADB, monitor, serial ports, heck even your modem. Nice design.
We did have some Mac clones (PowerPC I think), and they performed every bit as well as the real Macs, but the price wasn't that much better.
Still, having a mini tower with card slots and drive bays for the price of a Mac-mini, oh so cute, but how do you expand? I can see the merits to that.
Come on Freescale, get CodeWarrior ported to the Mac, and don't charge an extra $500 for it like you did with the Linux version (that's right, compiler for Linux $500 more than the windows based one!)
How I wish the Intel version of Mac OS X and this hardware had been available in 2004 when I got my Power Mac G5. It has turned out to be such a bad investment -- unreliable and flaky. And from reading the Mac forums, I am not alone: many others are having problems with their G5s, early iMacs, Power Books, etc. Something you rarely experience with standardized PC hardware.
ReplyDeletePsystar is indeed a very welcome player in the market. I'm sure there will be others soon.
My first mac was a PowerMac 7200, in 1995. It was a PITA to expand. The userfriendliness and the quality of the whole machine has jumped by leaps and bounds since those days.
ReplyDelete1995! So you never knew the joy of getting your first 80MB HDD on your Mac, and you never were frustrated when System 7 finally exceeded 60MB and so wouldn't fit on a single drive in your older dual 60MB drive system.
ReplyDeleteI had brief exposure to Mac Classics at Uni, but didn't really get Maccy until '93 when I started coding for LCII and LCIII's. All the books (Inside Macintosh) were still giving examples in Pascal back then, even though they had switched to C.
Best Mac experience? I found that screen base address was used as constant at compile time, code I wrote for my LCIII wouldn't work on my Quadra until I recompiled on the Quadra.
The company claiming to make this Mac clone seems a little fishy.
ReplyDeleteSteve Farr wrote in comments ...
ReplyDelete"Curiously, when Woz and Jobs built the Apple I, they also sold it out of a garage. Their phone number, like Psystar, also ended in 66666 (the unit also sold for $666.66!).
My theory: Psystar is actually Wozniak having a laugh!"
Man you are not a mac user, if you were then this would not be here.
ReplyDeleteDo you mean that if I was a Mac user, I would be protecting Apple's profit?
ReplyDeleteOn a related note
ReplyDelete