A company called Psystar is advertising a $399 pseudo-Mac called the “OpenMac,” which it claims is made from standard PC parts and is compatible with OS X Leopard.
Based in Miami, Florida, Psystar is courting a legal smackdown from Apple, which ended its official “clone” program in 1997 after Steve Jobs returned to run the company. Intended to grow the Mac platform, the clones instead took market share from Apple, seriously impacting its botttom-line.
Which is why Apple will likely pounce on Psystar: the Mac is Apple’s most profitable line, and the last thing Apple wants is a company producing low-cost knockoffs.
Apple will likely center on the use of Leopard: The operating system’s software license forbids it being installed on non-Apple hardware.
Psystar’s butt-ugly OpenMac claims to be a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, integrated Intel graphics, a DVD burner and four USB Ports. Most of the components can be upgraded with better graphics or bigger hard drives. Psystar says:
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
12 responses to “Miami Company Offers Low-Cost Mac Knock-Off — Apple Lawsuit Sure to Follow”
I can’t get either of the Psystar pages to load, but the synopsis certainly was interesting. Many questions still remain, however. Does it have a wireless card? Bluetooth? FireWire? What about expandable bays? Graphics options? Mac users are used to their software being able to take full advantage of their hardware (or vice versa), and if this knock-off is too stripped down, it will do nothing but cheapen the Mac experience. At the very least this company shows that (if legit) a budget-priced, expandable Mac tower is feasible. Apple should take note and, if possible, improve and perfect.
It isn’t really butt-ugly at all, I mean the tower part is but over all, except for that blue light, it looks pretty good.
Whoo.
Once you buy Leopard and iLife it’s up to $607. Ok, so it’s got better specs than the $599 mini, but there goes the whole “I could make a Mac for half the price” argument you hear all the time.
Really, that’s who it’s hoping to attract…people who don’t want to pay Apple’s prices. Turning that around and saying “Well, you’re still paying Apple prices, but we’ll give you slightly BETTER tech specs!” isn’t really going to thrill that crowd.
So who’s it going to impress?
This is all assuming the thing survices the next OS update without mysteriously losing functionality. A big “if” there.
According to the arstechnica article (http://arstechnica.com/journal…, they’re not guaranteeing that all software updates will work. So that kind of addresses Jeff’s question about OS updates. In other words: “Ya feelin’ lucky, punk?”
Dude… what people always forget about Apple, is that it’s the Design. Which is why it wouldn’t matter even if Apple licensed OS X for the PC (something they’d never do).
I’m a relatively new convert, and I bought my MB Pro on a lark. My expectation was fully that I’d probably wind up running Windows on it.
But I got the machine because it was the finest Intel laptop in the world (now of course there isn’t a windows machine in my house, and I write at a place called, Cult of Mac –I guess converts do make the best evangelists ;) ).
I agree with some of my fellow readers — though the initial price tag is modest, the price fails to cover the cost of Leopard and iLife (not to mention the fact that it is likely that users won’t be able to update). I would assume that most computer users by now have realized that usability is worth the cost. I’d rather pay a little bit more and have a working machine than try to save a few pennies and have an unsupported knockoff.