Company claims to sell Mac clone for $399

Personal technology enthusiasts yearning for the Mac Experience without the Apple Tax—that huge markup that Mac users pay for off-the-shelf PC hardware with OS X—your days of gnashing teeth may be over. Psystar, a plucky little company from Miami, Florida is, for the moment, selling OpenMac, a Mac clone with Leopard pre-installed for $554. You also get:

For another $110, you can get an NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT, and for another $50, you can get FireWire too. Even without that, this price seems a little high compared to other OEM PCs sold by mom and pop. I guess we could call the overhead the Apple Legal Defense Fund Tax, because the EULA (PDF) for Leopard makes the legality of this computer seem dubious.

Setting aside legalities, the OpenMac supposedly works with Mac-compatible hardware and an EFI emulator. Psystar claims the "OpenMac is a configuration of PC hardware capable of running unmodified OS X Leopard kernels," but the company also says this.

Well, that's reassuring. So much for a Software Update hack, but it doesn't really matter. A cheap, upgradeable alternative to a $1999 Mac Pro will never be more than a fantasy among personal technology enthusiasts engaging in endless circular arguments on the Internet. Anyone who wants to build their own Mac and patch OS X to run on it is pretty much free to do so—notwithstanding software updates that trash your Hackintosh. Apple doesn't care about you. You can even talk, circumspectly, about your efforts. But try to take one penny of the dollar a year Steve Jobs makes, and you'll be thinking different without the metaphorical equivalent of the KY.

All that aside, I know that in some areas of intellectual property, you can lose your IP rights if you don't make a good faith effort to enforce them. I don't know if the courts have ever applied that to a EULA

You have some very good questions and observations. Apple will get blamed for any of the problems of the clones. Microsoft got blamed for poorly-written programs that had problems on Windows, and Windows is full of application-specific hacks as a result. Clones would be very bad for Apple's image.

But as far as the EULA goes, I would like to see that contested and rendered unenforceable in part. Too many EULAs today do their best to strip you of your consumer and even constiutional rights. Many say you can't publish benchmarks or product reviews without consent, which of course means poor scores won't get published and the public will be less informed. Both Microsoft and Network Associates have tried to enforce these. The NA EULA for McAfee was deemed unenforceable after NA used it to silence some unfavorable reviews.

Microsoft backed down rather than have a EULA found unenforceable after some very poor benchmark results (not a hack job, MS reps actually worked with them to try to get better results). Microsoft EULAs don't prevent publication anymore, but they do enforce some rules. I think the rules are reasonable, but it's still an infringement on free speech. They can sue for interference with trade or defanation if unfair benchmarks are published.

24 used Mac's inside of "CTU". I've seen them on a number of shows and movies. And you are right, Mac's are huge with creative folks. For photo's and video production, Mac is typically the weapon of choice.

It's also amazing to see how many Macs you see on Nova and the various Discovery Channels on the desks of researchers and scientists.

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