Pystar, a company from Miami, Florida, is currently selling a Mac clone called OpenMac with Leopard pre-installed for $554. A considerable amount less than what Apple charges for their offical Macs. The system comes with:
* 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU,
* 250 GB Hard Drive (7200 RPM),
* 2 GB DDR2 667 RAM,
* Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics,
* DVD+/-R Optical Drive,
* 4 USB ports,
If you dish out an extra $110 you can get a GeForce 8600GT thrown in. Another helping of $50 will add FireWire support to your OpenMac. What’s rather funny and ironic is that the Leopard EULA states "You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so." I don’t really think I need to explain the irony here.
On the subject of updates, Pystar states "Can I run updates on my OpenMac? The answer is yes and no. No because there are some updates that are decidedly non-safe. Yes because most updates are not non-safe. It’s best to check on InsanelyMac for this information but when in doubt don’t update it. You may have to reinstall your OS X if it is a non-safe update."
Would you buy this? I guess that’s a bit of a dumb question considering Apple’s legal team will be on this like white on rice very soon, but the question still stands. I for one would not. Sure, it’s cheap (as far as computers go, anyway) but you don’t get official Apple support. That’s a very crippling fault of this Mac clone (or any Mac clones for that matter).
UPDATE:
Gizmodo did some snooping around at the Miami Chamber of Commerce and the Better Business Bureau and found out that the company was not registered in their records.
After tracking down the address of the company, it turns out that the address is registered under USA Koen Pack and not Psystar. Logging onto the Psystar website produces this message:
"Thank you for visiting Psystar. We’re sorry but the store is temporarily down due to the fact that we are currently unable to process any credit card transactions. Please send an e-mail to support@psystar.com with the subject line "UPDATE" so that we can update you when the store comes back online. For customers who have already placed orders: if you received a confirmation e-mail then your item is in queue to be built and shipped."
The official Psystar website states that the confusion about the address was due to a typo that was printed in their contact page:
"We’re in the process of moving to a new location which is now listed on our contact page. The first new address posted (10481) was in error and our correct address is 10475 NW 28th Street. PSYSTAR was, prior to this past week, not ready to handle the enormous production capacity demanded by the online community. Due to the incredible response we have now expanded to a larger commercial unit to handle the supplies and assembly of Open Computers. THANK YOU for all of your orders."
So for the time being, maybe the safest thing to do is to put your money away and wait until all of this is sorted it out.
[With additional reporting by Frank Ling]
[via Ars Technica]
