Engadget goes hands-on with a Psystar
Earlier this month, Psystar announced their intention to sell Leopard-ready, Core 2 Duo minitowers for $399US. The announcement drew a lot of attention, including that of Apple Legal.Still, a few machines have arrived in the wild, and yesterday some lucky owner posted a very brief video of his Psystar hackintosh booting. That was interesting enough, but check this out. Our friends at Engadget have gotten their hands on one, and intend to put it through the ringer. Performance tests, software, hardware, you name it. Right now, they've got some great unboxing photos up.
As for testing, they're open for suggestions. Have you got a certain test in mind? Drop them a line and perhaps they'll try it out for you. Have at it!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
mark said 2:21PM on 4-30-2008
Great app:)
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Gordon said 2:27PM on 4-30-2008
Where is the evidence there was any attention paid by Apple legal? Surely if there was anything Apple could do or wanted to do it would have happened by now? And by the way, this is where the expression "put it through the (w)ringer" comes from,
http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:fMi5ztalYPxyXM:http://www.albernionline.com/hos/copperwasher.jpg
but you are probably too young to have any idea what it really means, so your incorrect spelling can be forgiven.
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mrsteveman1 said 5:20PM on 5-01-2008
You forgot to tell them to get off your lawn
Just_a_guy said 3:26PM on 4-30-2008
I want you guys to do some basic tests as if you were going to test a REAL mac....
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Ted said 3:28PM on 4-30-2008
Its a shame that you guys are giving coverage to clearly a violator of IP. The more press and reviews they get, the more legit it appears their products are. When in reality they are violating Apple's and other's IP.
I can't wait for Apple to unleash the dogs on them for stealing their IP.
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adam said 4:08PM on 4-30-2008
Ted, you are only half right. Yes, Apple Legal has a right to come after them, but not for copyright infringement. They are in violation the EULA for Leopard. The copy of OS X included in the computer is a "legit" Leopard license as you receive a retail DVD of the OS with your computer. I should however add they are using a piece of software called pc_efi which emulates the EFI bootloader that a real mac uses which was written by a person on the osx86 "scene" called netkas and Psystar was never given permission to use the software comercially and in fact, it is stated on netkas' site somewhere that commercial use is forbidden.
JohnPQ said 6:16PM on 4-30-2008
Who cares? Apple has like 9 billion dollars worth of cash in the bank. It's about time someone makes a Mac for the masses. Instead of some glossy toy that only a few can afford or want. I'm totally cheering for Psystar!
MrBlank said 4:49PM on 4-30-2008
There's no firewire on that thing!
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Teo said 6:35PM on 4-30-2008
Will it blend?
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Zak said 7:38PM on 4-30-2008
JohnPQ: The Psystar machine will set you back $550 with Leopard. You can get a brand new Mac Mini with Leopard and iLife, not to mention no EULA violations and no half-assed mickey mouse hack jobs to get the OS to run on the hardware, for $600.
So what was that again about "only a few can afford"?
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bob said 7:55PM on 4-30-2008
fans are on full ALL -THE-TIME, dhcp needs resetting every 15mins in system prefs, and an update will probably knock this thing out, needless to say the assembler has pissed off both apple and the osx86 community and violated osx agreement and the efi emulation agreement, youd be mad to buy this, most people will be doing it because the processes on osx86 are to complex for them, yet as soon as there is a problem, all they'll be able to do is install windows or linux without the know-how, its one big stupid idea and its a shame that its the impression some people will get of osx
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Jas said 9:28PM on 4-30-2008
Any source for the fans always on and DHCP glitches? I watched the recent video, and just assumed they'd used a cheap PSU to shave some pennies off the finished product, but I'd like to see where anyone has demonstrated these things are genuinely bad news.
bob said 7:57AM on 5-01-2008
yes, the engadget article / review, they have it and they say the noise makes it pretty unusable, and the dhcp, well i think you could imagine how annoying that would be, these things just dont work and wont last, they are a waste of money, osx86 is just a hobby, not a business, it is not a min computer, also how many unseen problems are yet to be encountered, thats just a fist impression.
Thomas said 2:47PM on 5-01-2008
Legality and quality of the product aside, I don't know why anyone would consider buying from this company. Everything they've done so far has been half-assed at best.
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bugster said 4:58AM on 5-01-2008
What amazes me is why anyone would pay that much for a machine they could easily build themselves for $250 or pay their local PC monkey $350 for. They didn't even bother to search the OSX86 community to find the most compatible components. I don't see any promise on their website to make update installers or drivers available either.
Anyone who thinks this is the fabled xMac is sadly mistaken, if you want to make use of those slots you'd better be prepared to get your hands dirty digging around for driver kexts and installing things from the command prompt.
I've used OSX86 and it can be made to run well with some fiddling, but there are always little annoying issues, usually with networking, video or sound. Of course any system or security updates end up requiring a re-install plus reapplying any kext fiddling you had to do for your motherboard/chipset. Most application updates will work fine, but there's always the chance that a quicktime update will rub something the wrong way and bork your system.
I support the work that the OSX86 community has done because they're not out to make money from it, it's a purely hacker thing, making something work in a way it wasn't intended. Psystar is just a fly-by-night that's trying to make money off both OSX86 and Apples work without contributing anything themselves.
Unfortunately this could result in Apple implementing some kind of horrid registration/verification scheme that would hurt everyone.
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