Psystar sells t-shirts, asks for donations following Apple injunction

11:00 am, December 28th, 2009, John Brownlee

For the crime of selling Hackintoshed PCs with OS X pre-installed, Florida-based Psystar, Inc. got the sort of suing from Apple usually consigned to the pages of slash fiction written by the most depraved of litigation fetishists. If the word “reaming” can be used in polite society, that’s what Psystar got, and from the resulting hole agape Apple’s lawyers reamed out every last, ill-begotten penny.

Needless to say, Psystar’s now resorted to rattling around the Web 2.0 equivalent of a beggar’s tin cup as they plead for alms. Since they can no longer sell their line of Mac clones to make money, and since they appear to have decided not to risk Apple’s wrath further by selling their Rebel EFI software until the courts have clarified its legality, Psystar is now asking for $20 to $100 donations on their website.

If charity isn’t your bag, they’re also selling t-shirts for $15. The t-shit reads “I sued Psystar” on the front and “…and all I got was a lousy injunction.” on the back. It’s sort of a nonsensical slogan, unless Steve Jobs buys one of these, but it’s also flat-out misleading: Apple was awarded $2.7 million in damages from Psystar, which they have presumably yet to pay.

Finally, Psystar have announced their new business plan, taking the injunction into account. It’s smart: they’ll basically sell desktops that are built using only components that have Snow Leopard drivers available for them, leaving it to the end user to install OS X on the machine, or not, as they see fit. In other words, they are still targeting the Hackintosh community, just legally. It’s a good idea. I bet they wish they’d done that in the first place.

Posted by John Brownlee in News | Comment on this article

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About the author

John Brownlee has written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Berlin with a charming girlfriend against whom he is currently enjoying a thirteen game cribbage winning streak, and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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5 comments

Idiots. I would have sold black mock turtlenecks.

rdowns, on December 28th, 2009 at 11:19 am

it was hardly a ‘lousy injunction’. and there’s no questions about the legality of Rebel EFI. As it functions to put the Mac OS on unapproved systems, it’s illegal under the injunction.

i would be shocked if anyone bought a shirt or make a donation considering that the only community that might have supported them was the HackMac world and most of them are pissed due to the evidence that just like they didn’t write their own OS, they didn’t even write Rebel EFI. they lifted another software, slapped a crappy GUI on the front of it and started selling it.

Charli, on December 28th, 2009 at 12:05 pm

Pystar wins the Tard of the Year award.

Daniel, on December 28th, 2009 at 12:38 pm

All Psystar did was to steal other people’s work, work of h-tosh community which is available for free, and work of Apple which is protected by intellectual property laws.

So the t-shirts should read:

Psystar, I ripped off other people, and all I want is to make money from their hard work.

Obama Pacman, on December 28th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

The t-shirts just prove that they aren’t original in any of their thinking. #fail

Ictus75, on December 28th, 2009 at 2:02 pm