Filed under: Apple Corporate, Hardware, OS
Open Tech plans to release Mac clones
A few years ago, I was walking through downtown Boston with my Burger King bag and Coke. I ran into a friend in Kenmore Square who was on his way into a pizza joint. He asked me to join him and we both sat down.As I unwrapped my Whopper, anticipating the greasy goodness that would undoubtedly shorten my life, the owner began shouting from behind the counter.
"Hey!" he said with a heavy Boston accent. "You cahhn't eat that in here. Go pahhk it someplace else!" You see, I was eating the competitor's food in his shop. Or, in geeker terms, running their software on his hardware. That's a no-no in some circles.
Someone tell Open Tech.
Unfettered by Psystar's recent run-in with Apple Legal, Open Tech has announced their new hardware lineup, including a desktop able to run XP, Vista, OSX Leopard and Ubuntu, featuring
- Intel Pentium D 945 3.40GHz Dual-Core Processor
- 500 Gb Hard Drive
- 3 GB of DDR2 Ram (667 MHz PC 5400)
- CD burner
- 802.11g Wi-Fi.
Still, we are talking about Apple's Whopper in Open Tech's pizza joint.
Personally, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to run whatever OS I please on my own machine. Sadly, that's not the way things are.
[Via MacNN]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Niroshan said 6:43PM on 7-21-2008
haha great analogy!
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Jason Hung said 6:47PM on 7-21-2008
If I were them, I would argue that I'm selling a Mac-capable machine, meaning that if Apple were to theoretically open up the licensing for OS X, all the hardware would be capable on day one.
As long as they're not blatantly advertising it as a Mac, but as a machine capable of OS X/Mac spec'd, they'd be able to get around the same issues Psystar is having. The problem with Psystar is they're blatantly advocating and supporting the use of OS X on their machines, while providing just the hardware required can equally do the trick.
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jrog said 6:47PM on 7-21-2008
Actually, it's a backwards analogy. As the seller of the burger, I'm all for you buying it from me and taking it somewhere else. In gets the advertising out of the store, and somewhere else, and I don't have to clean up after you for using my tables and services.
The analogy is more like buying their ketchup/special sauce, so you can put it on someone else's burger.
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Jeff said 6:48PM on 7-21-2008
"Personally, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to run whatever OS I please on my own machine."
you can. you just need to figure out how to do it yourself. A company profiting, though, is different. Apple isn't really in the OS market; they're in the Hardware market. and theoretically these crappy little boxes are stealing sales away from Mac Minis. theoretically.
Here are a few other naive, silly-shit phrases that make about as much sense:
Personally, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to use Tivo software on my generic DVR.
Personally, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to run the real-deal iPhone interface on my HTC Touch.
Personally, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to play audio encoded in DTX on my Dolby-only receiver.
give me a break.
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Sam Major said 7:31PM on 7-21-2008
Here, here!
So, Dave – you don't See why.. or you just don't Get why?
Carney said 9:27AM on 7-22-2008
It's "hear hear" not "here here". Sigh.
Paul Sommers said 6:54PM on 7-21-2008
Don't forget that Apple is not Microsoft - a software company.
Apple is a hardware company first and foremost and they make software to run on that hardware.
That's why Apple has split off all it's cross platform software (which pretty much only consists of Filemaker Pro but...).
All there other software is to make you buy a Mac, and is priced accordingly. The software is a value add to their hardware.
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Alex said 6:56PM on 7-21-2008
Interesting... I would be cautious though; the site uses Freewebs on a .tk domain. Anyone could whip up a site like that.
But either way, none of their items are available according to their site.
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Michael said 7:01PM on 7-21-2008
Hah, there is no direct link but checkout the "320GB External Hard Drive" under the "Web Store" section.
Tell me what that looks EXACTLY like, except in black instead of white :)
Good job with the marketing, though, this is all someone has to do in order to get around the legal troubles.
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Darren said 7:03PM on 7-21-2008
Lots of companies sell "Mac compatible" computers these days. And the instructions to install Leopard on these machines can be easily downloaded from the internet.
If you want a beige box Mac, don't bother buying it from these guys.
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Andre said 7:14PM on 7-21-2008
I'd love to see Apple sell a version of OSX for clones. They would put a serious dent in Microsoft.
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Zak said 7:57PM on 7-21-2008
How soon they forget. Apple already tried licensing the Mac OS to clone makers. Power Computing, Motorola, Radius, Daystar and Umax all made Mac clones and sold them.
It nearly killed Apple, and it was a disaster. It did not put any kind of dent in Microsoft, all it did was convince existing Apple customers to buy clones instead of Macs.
Andre said 8:36PM on 7-21-2008
Yes, but that was Mac clones. Mac's are Intel boxes now, so they could put out a PC version so people could choose their OS.
Of course their previous attempt wouldn't have affected Microsoft - they weren't Microsoft capable machines. I have 3 Windows machines in my house I would gladly reformat to run OSX if I could. I've tried to install OSX on one of them without success. If there was a version that was made for my PC, Apple would sell 3 licenses in my house alone.
Cory said 9:15PM on 7-21-2008
They may or may not sell a lot, but you're missing the entire point of the Mac and OS X. If Apple opened OS X to run on any PC it would become just as unstable and unpredictable as Windows. One of the reasons Apple can create such a great sturdy OS is because they control everything about the environment the OS runs in. Every bit of hardware that goes in it from the motherboard to the video card to each and every chipset and everything else, it's all a single configuration (or slight variation of the same configuration). They don't need to worry about driver conflicts or hardware compatibility with other things in the box, it all works together. Just because as Mac users we don't have to worry about drivers doesn't mean they aren't in there, Apple just knows what drivers need to be included to make the machine work with all the different Macs sold and that's what goes into the OS.
If Microsoft made a Microsoft computer with a Microsoft motherboard and a Microsoft video card and Microsoft RAM then they would be able to make a rock solid stable OS as well and it would be very much like the OS X experience. Obviously this is a bit of an overstatement as Apple uses different vendors for all these components, but it's all the same idea.
Sparks said 2:17PM on 7-22-2008
The simple answer is that by controlling the hardware, Apple gets to do better quality control on the software.
As much as we may love to rag on Microsoft, a lot of the problems and instabilities in Windows come from the fact that the OS has to support 14 billion different video cards, sound cards, etc. And since drivers run at a very low level, if that cheap Korean soundcard in that generic slapped-together low-cost computer has drivers that are buggy, your OS stability suffers. Microsoft cannot do much about this, because there's no way on earth they can actually vet all the device drivers.
Apple, in contrast, controls their hardware; they can say 'we are only putting in one of these 8 video cards,' and then they only have to work with 8 video card drivers (or less, honestly, if some of those cards share an identical driver), rather than 8 million video card drivers. Same with any other piece of hardware.
Sure, we can say, 'Apple should open up the OS to run on generic PCs,' but then they have a huge morass of different hardware to support... and you'll find the stability and reliability of the OS goes downhill, as a result. Yes, OS X has a better architecture than Windows, but a cruddy driver can still kernel panic OS X quite readily.
Sparks said 2:17PM on 7-22-2008
The simple answer is that by controlling the hardware, Apple gets to do better quality control on the software.
As much as we may love to rag on Microsoft, a lot of the problems and instabilities in Windows come from the fact that the OS has to support 14 billion different video cards, sound cards, etc. And since drivers run at a very low level, if that cheap Korean soundcard in that generic slapped-together low-cost computer has drivers that are buggy, your OS stability suffers. Microsoft cannot do much about this, because there's no way on earth they can actually vet all the device drivers.
Apple, in contrast, controls their hardware; they can say 'we are only putting in one of these 8 video cards,' and then they only have to work with 8 video card drivers (or less, honestly, if some of those cards share an identical driver), rather than 8 million video card drivers. Same with any other piece of hardware.
Sure, we can say, 'Apple should open up the OS to run on generic PCs,' but then they have a huge morass of different hardware to support... and you'll find the stability and reliability of the OS goes downhill, as a result. Yes, OS X has a better architecture than Windows, but a cruddy driver can still kernel panic OS X quite readily.
fetteredByVocabulary said 7:32PM on 7-21-2008
unfetter |ˈənˌfɛdər|
verb [ trans. ] [usu. as adj. ] ( unfettered)
release from restraint or inhibition : his imagination is unfettered by the laws of logic.
I don't see how Apple v. Psystar unfetters OpenTech. Perhaps you meant "unfazed":
unfazed
adjective
we thought the news would upset him, but he seemed unfazed calm, unruffled, unperturbed, untroubled, poised, relaxed, self-possessed, nonplussed, together, laid-back.
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sirdir said 7:54PM on 7-21-2008
Yes, the analogy isn't that good. It's more like Burger King wants to forbid you you eat their burgers in the park. You can eat pizzas there, but not their burgers.
And by the way, that doesn't work in most countries ;)
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sirdir said 7:55PM on 7-21-2008
... and you paid for both the pizza and the burger, you're just not allowed to eat them together ;)
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Oni said 10:04PM on 7-21-2008
Those specs, minus the wifi look oddly like a compusa barebones deal going on right now. Right down to the exact case you get with it.
http://www.compusa.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3947466&CatId=2254
Am I wrong?
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