Erstwhile ‘Mac cloner’ Psystar pulls plug; ‘shutting things down immediately’

Black Friday Apple Blowout VI“Psystar Corp. is in the process of closing down its operations, a move that follows a court decision earlier in the week barring it from selling products already found to have violated Apple Inc. copyrights,” Ben Charny reports for Dow Jones

“The Doral, Fla.-based computer maker, which made machines that run Apple’s popular Macintosh operating system, intends to fire its eight employees, company attorney Eugene Action told Dow Jones Newswires on Thursday,” Charny reports. “Psystar President Rudy Pedraza will then be ‘shutting things down immediately,’ Action said. ‘They will not be in business.’

Charny reports, “Action said Psystar intends to appeal the recent decision. ‘We respect the robe,’ Action said, referring to U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who issued the ruling.”

Charny reports, “Late Thursday, Psystar’s Web site was inaccessible.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: What we wrote in our very first Psystar report on April 14, 2008: “Expect Psystar’s Mac mini shoved into a fugly ATX PC tower case, er… ‘OpenMac,’ to be shut down quicker than a Windows-powered Navy destroyer.”

For the U.S. court system, we consider 20 months to be “quick.”

55 Comments

  1. Now all the 786 idiots that actually purchased one of these PC boxes finally get the value that they deserved for supporting such a gun blazing company. ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />

  2. I wonder how much market share apple will need before their vertical integration becomes anticompetitive. If MSFT had only 10% OS market share, I doubt anyone would have cared that they were bundling IE. How long can Apple be successful before the FTC messes up their business model?

  3. Josh,
    Regular PCs don’t need a second option. Consumers need to choose the smart option – a Mac. And if they just can’t bring themselves to do it, that’s their own fault. Chrome OS is coming next year… they can have that.

  4. Wow! Eight employees! What did they pay for salaries? Divided by 8 the gross earnings would give each of the 8 around $30k. That doesn’t take into account cost of cheap parts and the money the owners were taking out of the company nor the cost of their legal efforts. they must have paid these poor workers peanuts!

  5. It was a stunt to try and get VC money.
    With no internet buzz the company would have closed 6 months after it opened and would have sold maybe a hand full of systems.
    But, Psystar figured if they could pump the internet and generate enough buzz they could pump some Free VC Money into Rudy Pedraza’s pocket and then he could walk away Rich and leave the VC’s on the hook to Apple and the law.

    After being burned the VC’s didn’t buy it and Pedraza brothers gotten a ride on the Legal system.

    But, not to worry the Pedraza brothers are always up for a good scam. And Apple is the leader and they’re still looking to see how they can scam some users wanting to go with Apple but, wanting a cheap as you can get PC. Expect them to steal some more open source code and claim they created it and sell a scam product like the EFi-X by Art Studios Entertainment Media. (Where Open source code + USB Key with a DRM Chip = profits!!! The EFi-X might cost a whole 5 dollars if that to make and sells for about $300.00 and might work for 18 months if you are lucky before burning itself to a Crisp all sealed up in it’s secure from customer’s eyes poor heat transfer epoxy filled outer thin plastic shell).

  6. @anaknipedro
    The problem with your analysis is that Apple and Microsoft have very deferent business models. Apple is a hardware company. So they would have to have a monopoly in hardware and software to be able to get in any kind of antitrust trouble. So when your software solution is 90% prevalent and you tie your browser to your OS so it can not be deleted, which Apple has not done ever, then you have a problem. The issues that Microsoft faced was that the browser was embedded in to the OS with out means of deleting it to use a competing packaged, Apple has neve done this with it’s OS or browser.

  7. Its easy to put osx on any hardware today. If you like to run osx on your pc its no problemo. I helped a couple of my friends to get osx on their hp:s and no name mashines. Its all done in 30 min.

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