The Mac clone that isn't

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 15 April 2008 02:10

Opinion and Analysis

The announcement of a 'Mac OS X ready' PC by a US-based company led to its web site being swamped.

Psystar's Open Computer costs $US399.99, a significant saving on Apple's cheapest model, the $US599 Mac mini. The Open Computer features a faster CPU (2.2GHz Core 2 Duo vs 1.83GHz), twice the RAM (2G vs 1G), more disk space (250G vs 80G) and a 20x Lightscribe DVD burner instead of the mini's combo drive (CD writer/DVD reader).

Being a mini-tower design, these's also the possibility of fitting a graphics card with better performance than the onboard Intel GMA 950 graphics as well as additional storage.

When you add the price of Mac OS X ($US129), the price difference isn't so impressive, though the difference in the hardware specifications remains stark.

The fly in the ointment is that you can't legally use Mac OS X on a computer that isn't Apple branded. The licence agreement is quite clear about that.

According to Psystar, "The highly extensible Open Computer is a configuration of PC hardware capable of running unmodified OS X Leopard kernels." This has been achieved through the use of the EFI V8 emulator and "the addition of a few drivers, and possibly a patch, to ensure that everything boots and runs smoothly."