Psystar Sells Software Turning PCs Into Macs

Ed Sutherland ()

psystar-credentials_1

Psystar, already defending copyright infringement claims from Apple, Thursday announced it would sell software directly to consumers allowing PCs to run Mac OS X, including Apple’s Snow Leopard. The $50 software is in addition to selling to to OEMs.

The Psystar software supposedly supports systems using the Intel Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, i7 or Xeon Nehalem.

The “Rebel EFI” 8MB downloadable software promises to “the easy installation of multiple operating systems” on a single PC. The software will also support hardware and drivers. A free version is available, although it has a two-hour time limit and doesn’t support some functions. The limitations can be removed when purchasing Rebel EFI.

A copyright trial is expected to start January 11, 2010.

The Psystar versus Apple saga began in July 2008, when Apple filed the copyright lawsuit. In February, Psystar had a countersuit dismissed but was able to claim Apple was abusing copyright laws to protect its hardware. In May, the Florida-based company filed for bankruptcy. The next month, two lawyers were hired who have said “Apple has engaged in legal engineering.”

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[Via Psystar, 9to5Mac and CNet]

8 comments »

About the author

Ed Sutherland

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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  • Robert

    AWESOME! Hopefully I’ll be able to run Snow Leopard on my MSI Wind now without having to get too involved. But I didn’t see a mention of support for an atom processor. Time will tell.

  • Charli

    time will likely tell Psystar to pay up and cut it out. Even without copyright this is a blantant violation of access control parts of the DMCA.

    also those that have seen the program Psystar created say that it is over priced, totally blows as a GUI and still has some 50 steps to the process.

    so if you are going to go ahead and build a hackintosh at your own risk, you are better off doing it the hard way instead of paying for their slightly less than the hard way but still hard way

  • macaddicted

    Am I the only one who finds the password ironic? How long ’til the cracked version is on a bittorrent site?

  • TRRosen

    Forget DMCA, everything in this is uncredited illegal copied GPL code created by the hackintosh community. Where the hell is the EFF on this one.

  • iFanboy

    Ed Sutherland says that in May, ‘Psystar’ {PSYchological [warfare] STARtup?} “filed for bankhruptcy” and yet here the “Florida-based company” is still attacking Apple’s proprietary-based business.

    On one level, it’s very flattering that Psystar wants to fight to put what you imagine it must believe is a superior Operating System… cheaply (without the tied-in expensive hardware) now easily within reach of those inhabiting, computing and gaming in the vaster Parallel Cosmos ~ but does something Dark lurk out there? {whisper it sssssoftly}

    Who and what is really behind ‘Psystar’?

    It would be humiliating for Apple to have to continue to develop its operating system, with all the involved costs in salaries and labs… only to have to continually update Psystar, who would cannibalise and almost certainly reverse Apple’s growing market share… yet with no outlay for research and development.

    If Psystar succeeds, will ‘Apple Computer’ having become ‘Apple Incorporated’ no longer just signify that the Cupertino Cleverdicks have widened their interests, and mean instead that APPLE are no longer in the computer business? Was the name-change somehow prophetic?

    … “Once upon a time, there lived a wonderful, magical computer company”…

    Who could have known that the missing bite (always lost from the logo) contained a slow-acting poison that killed its own gardener?

  • iFanboy

    SORRY ABOUT THE TYPO ~

    Ed Sutherland says that in May, ‘Psystar’ {PSYchological [warfare] STARtup?} “filed for bankruptcy” and yet here the “Florida-based company” is still attacking Apple’s proprietary-based business.

    On one level, it’s very flattering that Psystar wants to fight to put what you imagine it must believe is a superior Operating System… cheaply (without the tied-in expensive hardware) now easily within reach of those inhabiting, computing and gaming in the vaster Parallel Cosmos ~ but does something Dark lurk out there? {whisper it sssssoftly}

    Who and what is really behind ‘Psystar’?

    It would be humiliating for Apple to have to continue to develop its operating system, with all the involved costs in salaries and labs… only to have to continually update Psystar, who would cannibalise and almost certainly reverse Apple’s growing market share… yet with no outlay for research and development.

    If Psystar succeeds, will ‘Apple Computer’ having become ‘Apple Incorporated’ no longer just signify that the Cupertino Cleverdicks have widened their interests, and mean instead that APPLE are no longer in the computer business? Was the name-change somehow prophetic?

    … “Once upon a time, there lived a wonderful, magical computer company”…

    Who could have known that the missing bite (always lost from the logo) contained a slow-acting poison that killed its own gardener?

  • Someone

    Seriously go to an hackintosh forums, built an PC that can support vanilla kernels. And install. Cost: $0.00 (Excluding cost of PC).

  • bubbakush

    i bought it and it didnt work on my two pcs
    funny cause i had it working with a disk called itakos or something but not rebel.