Photos: Psystar's Mac clones
Summary: Psystar claims its Open Computer can give the enjoyment of a Mac at a fraction of the cost.
Image 7 of 7
The hideaway front peripheral ports.
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Talkback
Waste of money?
Remember the iPhone fiasco?
Waste of money??
OpenBrick?
This is why, although I love the Mac, and have a Mac Mini that I dearly love .. except it's a bit slower with Leopard than it was with Tiger
But, I also have a nice fully OPEN Linux system as well that dual boots with Windows.
I wish Apple or a thrd party could just create an Open Aqua-like GUI that could be run on Open Darwin for those of us who can't afford their expensive systems.
brick?
Sign of the new economy
Now that the economy is in the tank, a lot of us Mac users' only chance at a new Intel-based Mac will be along the lines of the PlayStar; compatibility headaches or not.
You got that right, buddy.
It's not necessarily that OS X is a bad OS (I honestly haven't used it and can't say - my experience with Macs ended with OS 8.5 and the iMac) but that the skilled labor required to port a popular Wintel app to a Mac OS is not cheap, and that expenditure must be recouped by sales.
IBM was savvy enough to realize that not doing as Apple did and trying to monopolize the market for Intel iron would create a massive market for Microsoft OS-based computers, and that its slice of that market would be larger than ALL of the market for a less popular OS.
As long as Apple seeks to maintain a monopoly on building OS X machines, people who actually have to exchange data with other folks who use Wintel iron are going to look askance at them; so will software makers who can stay afloat very nicely while not entering the Mac market at all.
Apple made a gutsy move by going to Intel innards for their new Macs. It's time to follow through by going head-to-head with Microsoft as an OS manufacturer, and competing with them for market share.
Mac users tell us that OS X is better than Windows. Fine. SHOW US. Head to head, on the same machines.
Show?
It is not in numbers, but in interface. You have to use it yourself to understand what people at Microsoft do not uunderstand.
The keyword is: ergonomics. Nonoe of numbers beats that. You do not need to be a geek to use computer. Th is is the same as with car. Do you still use crank start for your car and check and fill oil yourself? Thses days you do not even need to know what clutch is or why one would need to change gears in car. That's convenience of use utility called car. the same with computer.
Plainly, Microsoft lost touch with progress on user interfaces. Simplicity and logic is important - not complexity and counterintuitive shortcuts and screens to serve someoene's purpose.
I am not going to prove why after being user and software developer for Windows for over 10 years (since 1991) I dropped it in 2003 and banned from my home in 2006. It is not worth my mental health to deal with its own problems. Ever since I have minor problems with doing everything the same (and sometimes more) when using network of Mac's that I run at home office/professional design studio/pleasure.
Good luck with Windows - until you do not try you will not know and be lost by asking for some "magic" numbers and side by side comparisons.
User interface? Give me a break.
In fact, Vista's voice recognition accuracy and ease of training is so good, it's scary (and I speak as someone who used to train paraplegics and other folks with severe disabilities in how to run their PCs with voice recognition as part of my job).
That's right - Vista comes, standard, with one of the best voice-recognition utilities I have ever seen. (This is with the standard audio circuits on a Dell Inspiron laptop with 1 Gb of memory and a Core Duo processor running at 1850 MHz.)
You don't hear about that, and I bet that if use of the voice recognition feature had been part of "the Mojave Experiment," they would have had to pry people off of the Vista machines. I'd say that was above-average human engineering.
Since Vista released SP1, the problems everyone reports have mainly gone away. I haven't had a system crash in over two months, more than my wife can say of her brand-new Mac desktop running OS X. In fact, she constantly complains of difficulties with the user interface with OS X, with ergonomic issues regarding the new Mac keyboard and mouse... not to mention that malware got onto their office's LAN and locked up access to office files for a week. These are problems she doesn't have at home with Windows.
We went away from using Macs in our home LAN - we had an iMac, which is gone, and the older Macs I hung onto are still here because I collect older computers - they're sitting right next to my CP/M computers, my Apple IIs and my TRS-80s. Macs are just too much hassle to use, and we ran into a spiraling obsolescence problem with the iMac - we'd have to upgrade OSes to run current applications, then upgrade hardware to run the new OSes, and... it made using Windows seem easy and inexpensive by comparison.
Better system, plus
Vey nice.
They were taken off guard by this so are looking for the best way to kill it. Or maybe they will let a few thousand of them be sold then[b] a Fix [/b] that will break them and leave many, many people with a Linux machine that cost over twice what it should have.
I think I'll wait till the first of next year before I get one.
I wish the OpenMac company good luck.
Still only a clone
OS X. Also, I would be very surprised if the quality of the
cases will be as good as Apple's.
This will be great for people who like eye-candy and don't
care about quality.
It won't be running OSX?
If I could get one here in Australia
RE: Open Computer (Photos: Psystar's Mac clones)
Are they really comparable?
They're all right.
If it runs OS/X, it's a Mac to me!
I haven't bought another Mac since (I had 3 at the time) as I'm not about to pay that kind of obscene markup on commodity-grade Intel hardware, no matter how pretty the case. It's about time the free market showed up and started forcing Mac prices out of the stratosphere.
Apple is the Packard of computing. (Google it, young 'uns)
Give me an affordable, reliable Ford any day.
RE: If it runs OS/X...
Give me an affordable, reliable Ford any day.[/i]
Just as long as that "Ford" is not named [b]Edsel![/b]
Be careful with that kind of talk!
"I'm not about to pay that kind of obscene markup on commodity-grade Intel hardware, no matter how pretty the case. It's about time the free market showed up and started forcing Mac prices out of the stratosphere."
It really sounds to me like they are saying, plain as day that Macs are more costly then Windows boxes, and certainly more costly than a Linux box. I can hardly believe you have risked saying such a thing given that any minute an Apple enthusiast is very likely to come along and slap you silly for saying it, and explaining in some convoluted fashion that Apples are very cost effective. Whatever thats supposed to mean.
RE: Open Computer (Photos: Psystar's Mac clones)
this. Moreover, there is bound to be something that doesn't quite work exactly
right.
Microsoft has to deal with this all the time given the multitude of different
hardware configurations that run DOS and Windows. That has to give them
headaches.