Mac 'cloner' Psystar pushes peck of pickled patches

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 21 May 2008 10:29

Opinion and Analysis

The story was much the same with its predecessor. Somewhere along the line it got a replacement video card to keep up with the hardware required by games, and that was it. By the time anything more substantial was required, wholesale replacement was a better option.

But don't think I'm anti-upgrade. Going further back, my Power Mac 7500 did benefit from the relatively open hardware.

I was able to significantly extend its life by upgrading the CPU (with a card purchased from a clone distributor's closing-down sale), adding a USB card so I could use more recent mice and other peripherals, and a fast SCSI card to drive what for the time was a larger and speedier hard drive than the internal SCSI bus would normally support.

The problem is that hardware specs are changing faster than ever, so a new computer every two or three years seems to make more sense than continually swapping out subsystems. I'm just not convinced that upgradability is as important as it was last century.

Before anyone berates me over the environmental issues, a PC's case is probably the most easily recycled component, so I don't have a guilty conscience about that. Doing something with those circuit boards is a bigger challenge, and I reckon my strategy produces less hard-to-recycle waste than the alternative.

So, the world will be waiting to see how Apple responds to the latest chapter in Psystar's challenge. Unless there's some action from Cupertino soon, Apple may find it impossible to get the genie back in the bottle as other companies follow Psystar's lead.