First commercial Hackintosh announced by Psystar

In checking their website, when a poster asked about application compatibility, they answered:

"Most applications work but Psystar cannot guarantee full functionality of or support by the application authors for every single application. As applications are tested they will be posted in the FAQ."

I think that says it all. Not so much about them working, but how much effort are they willing to put into testing a $400.00 white box? You know they're barely making a dime off these ugly boxes, so what incentive do they have to make a really good, compatible product?

The world is already filled with $400.00 computers. We need another one of these like we do a hole in the head.

You get what you pay for, have fun! I'll stick with the real deal, my time is too valuable to be a guinea pig.

Wow. I take great exception to the bad mouthing of the clones.

it was NEVER a quality question with clones, it was the fact that they were much MUCH BETTER than the Macs at the time.

Apple was being destroyed by its own channel partners(the clones undercutting their prices and Outperforming them at EVERY turn)

I myself am a PROUD owner of Several PowerTowerPros , and A couple of SuperMac S900s- they still work , and Still Smizzzzzzzoke the 95/8500s they were introduced against , as well as had a pricetag less than half of a "comparable" Mac.

Bad mouthing the clone companies is a Sure way to toss yourself on the "new mac user" bandwagon.

if you bought a starmax back in the day i can understand your frustration , but Cmon - The Powercomputing Pro lineup , the supermac Storm surge models, they are STILL the most powerful 604 based machines out there, even when comparing them to the 86/9600s the stability and reliability outshines the apple version completely- (the 86/9600s faster then 300mhz dropped like flies)

Dont be a bandwagon fanboy , spend some time with the hardware, just because Apple doesnt make it doesnt make it trash.

And After i say all this , it still doesnt matter, because yes they will get sued out of existence, and no they wont make even if they dont. Compaq and motorola couldnt keep their clones on the market, what makes you think these guys can?

APPLE BUILD US A MINITOWER!!!

Please...

ds

Some of the text from articles at the Psystar site is available at http://www.macmod.com/content/view/1331/243/ (including Psystar's answer to whether you can install standard OS updates from Apple).

I'm typing this from a Hackintosh and I can definitely say that it works really well. Aside from getting a $12 PCI network card, everything worked out of the box for my PC. I see Hackintoshes as a test for people who are thinking of a Mac but aren't sure. I've been very impressed with OS X so far, so much so that any future computer purchases that I make will definitely be Macs.

Who wants a hackintosh? People that want half decent graphics that's who. Or people that don't want an 'all in one' machine.

The iMac has a terrible graphics card and the Mac Pro is way out of most people's price range. Apple's desktop lineup is just silly and has been for years. Not to mention that the iMac's built in screen a massive turn off for everybody I've ever spoken to. I've got a 24" monitor already that I can connect all sorts of devices to (my Powerbook, games consoles etc) so why would i want to replace it with a built in screen that's far less versatile?

This is why I don't know hardly anybody that owns a mac desktop, the standard setup amongst my friends and colleagues is mac laptop + windows desktop. Lot's of them would love to have a mac desktop but they would never consider buying anything from the current lineup.
There NEEDS to be a headless mac with PCI-E graphics slot, otherwise the only viable option is Hackintosh :(

its not really news companies do this all the time. I own 5 computers 4 macs 1 PC. the PC runs Mac/Windows. As do all the macs.

I've got a question.... seeing as though Apple only makes the logic board that goes into their computers (ie. ram, hdd, cpu etc are outsourced), would it 'technically' be a mac if you built a computer around a mac logic board (ie. mac pro's)? And hence would it prevent all the compatibility issues and actually be legal?

The website is up, but they changed their name to Open Computer.

I posted screen shots for youz, since their website is slowing down from the ton of traffic they are getting. (fully loaded its around $1000).

http://homepage.mac.com/summergirl007/OPENMAC/PhotoAlbum214.html

I've had a hackintosh as my media center PC for over a year now, and I love it. The Mini nearly met my needs, but I like to play the occasional game and a $100 graphics card goes a long way (but not in the mini). So I built a $500 PC (sans the cost of my 2TB of disks) and connected it to a 32" lcd TV.

Granted, I spent ages trying to figure out the best way to install OS X on it. I finally decided on an install directly from my retail DVD as my motherboard only required modifying a couple of plists and installing the EFI emulation to get most things working (a fully functioning reboot required replacing one kext).

Almost all updates work. The only ones I don't install right away are the full OS updates (10.5.1,2, ...). But for those I usually just wait a few days to see if anything pops up on insanelymac forums.

So I have a nearly native install of OS X on my PC, with the stock kernel. Everything works well (except quicktime seems to randomly crash every few days) and I couldn't be happier. Hackintoshes are certainly not for the light of heart, as there are just too many things that can go wrong with some piece of hardware.

I have tried some of the prebuilt distributions out there (like iatkos, brazilmac, etc.) with mixed results. But all of my problems were caused by my PATA DVD-RW. In general, if you've got compatible hardware, these installers are almost as easy as installing OS X on a Mac.

So what's the point of all this? Apple needs a new model. I'd have gone with a Mac if there was a not-quite-so-pro version of the Mac Pro. I just want to be able to upgrade my system some day without spending over $1000 at the start. In the mean time I'm happy with my Hackintosh, but I certainly represent a small portion of the population, those hobbyists with too much time to waste.