Apple has won the first round vs Psystar

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Apple has won the first battle against Psystar.  Apple has won their claims of infringement on Copyright, trademarks, and with the enforcement of the EULA.
But what is more shocking is some of the comments from The Register\’s readers…

I\’m at a bit of a loss how I manage to install these \’upgrades\’ on brand new unformatted harddrives which are fitted into macs with no other harddrive and therefore no OS to upgrade and somehow I still manage to end up with a full OS on the HD.

The Psystar case is not about someone installing Mac OS X on a non-Apple approved harddrive.  Apple has always supported 3rd party hardware on their own machines.  It\’s about a company advertising 100% non-Apple Hardware as being an substitude for an Apple branded machine.

\”If you want to use OS X you have to pay the Jobs tax, you are forced to buy expensive hardware.\”

No. Apple don\’t care if you buy a copy of OS X and install it on your Hackintosh. Just don\’t expect any support from them. They\’re not going against the hobbyists here.

Apple DO care if you sell Hackintoshes with OS X pre-installed. That\’s the big no-no.


Apple cares, but not exactly for the reason you expect.
What happens when Uncle Fred shows up, and your showing off Mac OS X on your Psystar, and Fred\’s digital camera doesn\’t work.  Or you get a Kernel panic?  Fred won\’t blame Psystar for lousy hardware or a faulty drive, instead he\’ll see the Mac OS failing.  Or what about the owner?  Does he really know that he has an Hackintosh?  He\’ll still call Apple and attempt to get support, you see it all the time with people purchasing Dell\’s off Ebay.  (I have a Dell, what do you mean you need the reciept?).  At the end of the day, Apple will end up dealing with fall out from the Hackintoshes, and be blamed for the failures.

Much as I like fruit machines, they really could have worked with Psystar to license a cheap clone

Apple has done this in the past, and it failed. Because no matter how bad or good the clones were,  people were chosing them over the Apple hardware.  Of course, at the time the Apple hardware wasn\’t that much better than the clone hardware….  But your honestly expecting Apple to consider licensing the Mac OS to a \”company\” that effectively has been illegally loading it on their systems?  Apple survives due to hardware sales.  The Mac OS is an important part of that, but the OS sales will not pay for the entire company.
Sure it might be nice to attempt to branch the OS off to another subsidary, but we saw how well that worked for Palm, didn\’t we?

I would think it fair if they were to say, this system is designed for Apple supplied hardware, if the user chooses to run it on non Apple equipment, then they accept that Apple bears no responsibility for any support or problems.


And if Apple enforces that rule, they become the villian.  If you sell a piece of software to an intended audience, you must support it for that audience.  If Apple officially allows people to purchase the OS for use on Hackintoshes, then Apple must support it.
It\’s called an implied warranty.

implied warranty is a contract law term for certain assurances that are presumed to be made in the sale of products or real property, due to the circumstances of the sale. These assurances are characterized as warrantiesirrespective of whether the seller has expressly promised them orally or in writing. They include an implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, an implied warranty ofmerchantability for products, implied warranty of workmanlike quality for services, and an implied warranty of habitability for a home.

Comments on “Apple wins attack of the clones” • The Register.

New Insteon Lamp Dimmer Module (Dual Band)

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Smarthome has just announced, and made available for pre-order, a new series of Lamp modules…
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The new module, is powerline & RF based, so it can (potentially) replace your access points… Smarthome has attempted to create a slimmer module, one that doesn\’t look like a module, but more of a discreet device…
Pictured above is the 2 Pin module, I can\’t find the 3 pin module, so that maybe available later…

AMD avoiding Larrabee route on road to CPU/GPU \”Fusion\”

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Ars Technica\’s Jon Stokes discusses what he has learned about AMD\’s new \”Fusion\” CPU / GPU designs…

My immediate reaction on hearing Moore describe this was that AMD was planning to pursue the Larrabee route, and replace the GPU with a pool of small x86 cores. Obviously, you have to expose this \’GPU\’ hardware (in whatever form) to the OS as x86 hardware, so you\’d do this by either making it actual x86 hardware or by doing binary translation. But Moore\’s answer to a subsequent question along these lines made it clear that AMD sees the cost of replicating x86 front-end decode hardware across multiple small cores as too steep; instead, the company will more \’tightly integrate\’ the math hardware into the CPU core.

(View the rest of the article at ARS Technica – AMD avoiding Larrabee route on road to CPU/GPU \”Fusion\”)

Why It’s Taken 10 Years from Carbon to Snow Leopard

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

I have been going through my archives, and re-discovered the Cult of Mac\’s article on Why It’s Taken 10 Years from Carbon to Snow Leopard.
Here\’s my thoughts, and a link to the article…
First, the first release of Mac OS X, was actually Mac OS X Server 1.0, on October 27, 2000.  Each version of the OS has evolved from the previous version, making incremental (sometimes large incremental) improvements…
Why?  Why not take the Microsoft route, and spend a extra year or so, and make a revolutionary change?  For the same reason that Carbon was added into the plans of Mac OS X.
If Carbon, the programming API that allowed Classic Macintosh applications to run as native Mac OS X apps, had not been included in Mac OS X, it would of meant the death of Mac OS X.  The adoption rate would of been so low that the OS would probably have been stillborn.
Evolutionary, incremental change is not necessarily bad, it allows the users and programmers slowly start to utilize the new features at their own rate of comfort.  I expect with Snow Leopard, we will see some massive updates to applications, but only once the programmers have had time to digest what their options are.
via WWDC Flashback: Why It’s Taken 10 Years from Carbon to Snow Leopard | Cult of Mac.