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It's my blog, so I'm ranting again about no Mac Mini. It's enough to send my dough to Pystar. Then I'd get a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and a GeForce 7200GS 256MB for the price of the current Mini. No iLife, but I could finally run the new Picasa for Mactel. In my recent Vista experience, Picasa's got it all over iPhoto for looking through pix.
I'd rather have a supported Mac with iLife '09 -- the $999 refurb Air +$10 to upgrade to iLife '09 is tempting -- but over 500 days since Apple's so much as upped the proc on the Mini is too danged long. Seriously, can't they just slap in a faster processor? Not that I'd act happy, but the gesture would be appreciated.
My guess? They're waiting until they need to update the Mini to do so. OS X 10.6 is going to take advantage of video cards in slick ways by all accounts, and at that point you look like a fool to be putting out hardware that can't take advantage of it. Enter the Air's new dedicated chip, and the hardcore second chips in the MacBooks. Until then, those that need Minis will have to settle for the higher margin integrated ones.
But here's the big news. Apple alleges that it believes there are corporations and/or individuals behind Psystar, who may be added as defendants once Apple in discovery finds out who they are.
This is being played like there is a large corp behind Pystar, rather than Apple just ensuring it's got all the bases covered. I wonder if this might not be standard practice in similar lawsuits that get this far down the road. "And in case I missed anyone, I'm adding you now."
But let's play along -- Who wants to sell OS X boxen? Does someone believe the only thing between them and Apple is the OS? I thought what made Apple k3wl was the hardware design, right? I love iMovie. At this point, that's about all on the Mac I gotta have. The only other similarly cool software is Garage Band, but that's for a very small subset of computer buyers.
So who wants to sell these? All I can figure is Dell or another large box maker. Apple is grabbing too much laptop market and they want it to stop. I just don't see offering cheaper non-Apple boxes working, and the Pystar experiment would seem to be a heck of a gamble. *shrug*
I guess there's a spot between 5% and 50% where antitrust doesn't jump in, Apple isn't in a monopolistic position, and hardware manufacturers still want a piece of the pie.
Mac Rumors has a blurb today about Apple's legal team attacking Pystar with the DMCA:
ZDNet reveals that Apple has amended its lawsuit against Psystar with charges of violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA is a controversial law that criminalizes the act of circumventing copy protection.
I'm not sure exactly how Pystar gets OS X to work on their off-brand hardware. Still, Apple is getting an OS sale at retail price, I assume, for each Pystar box sold. This is not a total loss for Apple, and, as I think I discussed earlier, it could be a neat way to offload supporting folk looking for a bare bones box.
So perhaps Pystar has hacked something in a way that removes copy protection, but let's pretend they haven't. Let's pretend that they just used magic marker and got around it (I kid Hasselhoff, I kid!).
How far can someone go through licensing and the DMCA to restrict an item's use? That is, taken to ludicrous speed, if I slap a EULA and an RFID label on an Apple (making it at least partially digital), can I sue if you're curring them up and serving them on salads for friends? Perhaps that requires a, "Having folk over for dinner," license now.
In any event, I hope Pystar and Apple will become happy together. I understand Apple not wanting Pystar to create a laptop Mac clone. But I also understand them shoving the Mini off onto Pystar (though letting it grow to a tower). Seems like last time cloning Mac didn't work out so well, but it also seems that was due in part to bad negotiating. The cloning landscape changed once Jobs came back (again, check earlier link), but he wasn't opposed to cloning outright.
Check this from that Low End Mac article:
Motorola left the market at the end of the year, when its license expired, and Umax SuperMac hung in until the bitter end. Apple was working with Umax to license Mac OS 8 for low-end clones - specifically the sub-$1,000 market - but Umax realized there wasn't enough money to be made if they abandoned the high end of the market.
If Pystar can be convinced to stay in the sub-grand market, I wonder if we've got a deal.
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