In what can only be considered a turn of logic from an alternative “evil twin” universe, Hackintosh maker Psystar answered Apple’s cease and desist lawsuit of July 3th with their own alleging restraint of trade and antitrust violations.

via Computerworld

// Opinion Follows //

It’s been long anticipated that  Psystar would play the “Antitrust Card” in defense of its illegal activities.  The only thing is, it’s not illegal to have a monopoly. The key predicate to an antitrust suit is that the consumer must in some way be harmed by the monopolistic behavior of the defendant.  Rudy Pedraza, Psystar’s president summed up their consumer harm argument by saying: “It’s not that people don’t want to use Mac OS X, but they’re not open spending an exorbitant amount of money for something that’s essentially generic hardware.”

So that’s it, ‘the Apple’s hardware is too expensive’ argument we’ve heard time and time again, and have time and time again refuted. On a direct feature for feature comparison with Sony, HP or IBM, Apple hardware is no more expensive than the competition.

Our industry is FULL of monopolies that no one seems to disagree with, examples follow:

• Tivo has a monopoly on the Tivo OS, in that it too can only be employed on Tivo or licensed 3rd party hardware.
• Sony has a monopoly on the PlayStation, PS2, PS3 and PSP operating systems and regulates very closely the hardware they’re allowed to run on
• IBM has a monopoly on mainframes and the mainframe Z-OS
• even Microsoft has a monopoly on XBox OS and limits the hardware it can run on

While I can understand that free spirited hackers take unbrage at being locked out, there is nothing inherently wrong or illegal with Apple’s strategy of controlling the whole widget. Monopoly “sounds” bad on it’s own, but in Apple’s case they’re not abusing their power.

• CG: Jackass iPhone devs line-cut by exploiting naming conventions. Gizmodo: https://tinyurl.com/6p99yw (via Daring Fireball) #
• CG: Apple on iPhone cut and paste, GPS turn-by-turn and the lack of an iPhone office suite: https://tinyurl.com/67bgph (ExtremeTech) #
• CG: MacRumors reports that Psystar is indeed likely to get a butt-kicking over its Hackintoshes: https://tinyurl.com/5a69qq #

Celebrating the growing Hackintosh community, the small but prominent group of closeted Mac-lovers finding ways to put unauthorized installs of OS X onto garden-variety PCs, Willowhaven, a user at Insanely Mac, has created a set of logos to print out and slap on the side of your beige box to show your true heart.

They all look pretty good, except for that horrifying Apple + Dell logo. Some things simply can’t get redeemed.

Via Begley

There’s several new screenshots lighting up the internet that are purportedly taken from a new Leopard build (9A410).

Posted to Hackintosh, MacRumors, Flickr and elsewhere, the screenshots show a new, simple UI that’s darker and sharper than the current — note the corners of windows are no longer rounded. There’s less brushed metal, more soothing grey.
The screenshots on Flickr look much more like the current UI (Tiger) ,except Mail now has a metallic look.
But there’s something fishy about them. The interface is too plain and stripped back.

Many on the MacRumors’ forums think the screens are fake, and one poster on Flickr is sure about it.:

“Fake! Fake! Fake!

I write themes for OSX. And, I can tell you how this was most probably done:

The file Extras.rsrc still kinda works in the betas for 10.5 although, I hope that it will be removed before release.

Anyway, Installer based themes (though out of favor in 10.4) still work by replacing Extras.rsrc among other files.

Someone swapped out the normal Extras.rsrc and took some screen shots. Since most of the guts of 10.5 do not depend upon Extras.rsrc anymore, I am confident that 10.5 would run with a 10.4 Extras file for now.

Note that you do not see any signs of resolution independence! That is what would break this fake theme (since res independence calls to images not stored in Extras.rsrc).”

More screens after the jump