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Does not look like an apple shipping box.

Ugly, ugly.. but cheap

Apr 30, 08 - 01:50 pm Comment from: macoverdose_dot_com

The honeymoon will be over for them soon enough... OS X wise anyway. Once they are shut down on the OS X front they may thrive as a low cost Franken-box manufacturer. They are getting a ton of free publicity.

Apr 30, 08 - 01:52 pm Comment from: Hollywood North

Anyone taking bets on when the other shoe is gonna drop?


Is it so hard for a "journalist" to take pictures that don't suck? Sheesh.

Hint guys. With digital cameras, the film is free. Review each pic for clarity and make sure you've got a keeper before proceeding to the step stage of un-boxing.

Apr 30, 08 - 01:57 pm Comment from: Ampar

On the package tape:

"STOP"

"If tape seal is disturbed check contents before signing"

Wouldn't it be a little late by then for caution since prudence wasn't an issue?

Disturbed. Indeed.

How about re-boxing photos for when you need ship it back to get a software update.

When will Apple post pictures of the unboxing of their lawyers to unleash on Psystar?

I wonder if Psystar was stupid enough to except an order from Apple and has shipped it.

UGH!

If that's what the cheap-assed 'Doze loving crowd wants (a cheap-assed computer looking like it was pulled from a box of Cracker Jacks), then they can keep it!

OMFG, even as a cheap-assed white box, that's one cheap-assed looking case.

Have I mentioned that it looks cheap?

Apr 30, 08 - 02:13 pm Comment from: Ampar

That's one twisted Psystar and we're not gonna take it.

Apr 30, 08 - 02:14 pm Comment from: Ampar

"I wonder if Psystar was stupid enough to except an order from Apple and has shipped it."

Do you mean both of them?

What... no pubes!??

Dude!

(Note: If you paid $50.00 for that cheap-assed looking computer, you were ripped off)

In my best Fred Rogers voice:

"Can you say Cheesey? I knew you could!"

Still, if Apple won't make a reasonably price mini-tower, be prepared for someone who will.

-- Hano

is there anything worse than styrofoam peanuts?

besides getting a new mac with a parallel port?

i notice the posters who said this thing was never going to show up have shut up now, and the cheap looking criticism is fair but isnt it how it operates that counts?

Apr 30, 08 - 02:28 pm Comment from: Macintosh

Where's the photo of the vomit?

@Alasdair
Cheap?... If you add all apps pirated and feel ok to have no upgrades and no valid garantee of this illegal machine...

Apr 30, 08 - 02:29 pm Comment from: Ampar

"In my best Fred Rogers voice: Can you say Cheesey? I knew you could!"

So, more importantly than anything Psystar does or ever will do:

(From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette)
Robotics event honors Fred Rogers' legacy
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The third annual Mister Rogers' Robotics Adventure is set for 9 a.m. to noon at Sarah Heinz House, One Heinz St., North Side. The event is open to the public.

The competition is a collaborative effort among three local institutions -- the public TV series "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," Carnegie Mellon University and Sarah Heinz House.

The competition involves 17 teams of kids between the ages of 8 and 14 from local schools and youth organizations. Each team will design, build and program a robot, which will then compete in a series of 10 challenges.

The event is a tie-in to "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" Days -- a series of events presented by local cultural institutions that celebrate the legacy of the late Fred Rogers, who would have turned 80 this year. Some of the robot challenges are based on his popular children's series. In one, the robots have to hit a door knocker to make the Daniel Tiger character come out of a clock. David Newell, a k a Mr. McFeely of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," will be at the competition, which runs from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., with an awards ceremony at 11:45 a.m.

Apr 30, 08 - 02:29 pm Comment from: Buster

Too bad the pics did not come with audio....I love the jet engine sound it makes when turned on.....

But remember YOU CAN NEVER GET UPDATES and that is the end of the story.

I wish few million to invest in this company... If they can get around the legal issues, which I believe is possible, they will be sitting in a pretty strong to position ... could even license their tech to DELL. There's obviously a huge market for people with less than $500 to spend on a computer ... if they could get a mac-clone at that price, it would hot!

Apr 30, 08 - 02:33 pm Comment from: GizmoDan

It's common practice to have a barrier between the product and the shipping peanuts -- like a bag or something. So, are you expected to open the computer up to clean out the peanut scraps? Or do they blow out when you turn it on?

They should show the inside, and how you open it. I bet it looks almost exactly like a Mac Pro -- NOT!

Apr 30, 08 - 02:35 pm Comment from: mactricity

To: goo goo
You are correct, but that busted-up box does NOT instill confidence. I guess Psystar had to dig into their cache of boxes from the ebay orders they've placed.

My guess is Apple will let them operate for a while until they get enough evidence to sue them out of existence.

Apr 30, 08 - 02:42 pm Comment from: GizmoDan

Wow. It sounds like a kitchen blender! Or an XBox 360!

The horror! A Mac with parallel and serial ports? This is an abomination. I need eye-bleach. Please Apple -- KILL IT!

Apr 30, 08 - 02:55 pm Comment from: Predrag

Not that I'm any expert on Yiddish (and the word is of German origin anyway), but MDN, isn't it spelt vercochtet?

Gotta say, vercochtet it definitely is...

Apr 30, 08 - 02:58 pm Comment from: Gandalf

Love the way the had to label the buttons, shows the market they are aiming for.

On second thoughts shouldn't the buttons say 'Pull' instead of 'Push' - to make more sense to Windows users.

From the photos it looks like some junk bought from the Dollar Store or Wal-Mart.
What about service and support? Can't call Apple for the OS problems because it's not supported on that machine. You're pretty much on your own.
You really do get what you pay for.

Apple. Real Intelligent Design®

Those look like Leopard disks. I looks like they're reselling Leopard rather than pirating it, but doesn't their FAQ page say they don't recommend customers try installing Leopard on their own as it is so difficult. What use are the disks other than protect Psystar from piracy charges?

Oh, it IS just a cheap plastic case with cheap components. So basically your average PC box assembler, name or otherwise.

That's why I'll stick with Apple. Best quality with a genius eye for detail at a very reasonable price, through and through.

Apr 30, 08 - 03:02 pm Comment from: Jubei

" There Can Be Only One "

Whoever buys this POS deserves it. You want a cheap Mac, then get a Mac Mini. Or a refurbished Mac from the Apple Store. Don't make a mistake by getting this flawed Dopplegaenger!

Pystar Looks Like Crap.


Windows Vista :

1. The newest in a long line of crappy OS's from Microsoft. This one promises to track your every move, so watch out all you internet pedophiles out there!! they'll know who you are!

Gary finished downloading a few videos and suddenly the FBI crashed through the door. "Damn you, Windows Vista!" He screamed whilst they hauled his ass to the pokey.

2. The OS from hell that promises to make your life miserable and wish you can throw your previously fine computer out the window.

My computer is a f*@#$ mess since I changed to Windows Vista.

3.Microsoft's newest Operating System, the successor to windows XP. Windows Vista takes all the worst features of Windows XP, and makes them worse, moves them around to new, hard to find locations, and adds a ton of new features. Some of these new features are:

*Explorer windows that regularly freeze up
*A proprietary web browser, Internet Explorer 7, that comes packaged with the system and cannot be uninstalled or deleted.
*400+ MB RAM usage right off the bat.
*Built-in DRM to restrict a users ability to do most anything.
*UAC (User Account Control), a wonderful feature that questions the intelligence of its users by asking if they're sure they want to do what they're trying to do, then double-checking that they didn't accidentally press "Yes" when they meant "No."
*Shadow-copy, and other similar hidden processes, that keep hidden backups of your data files to ensure that your privacy is always compromised.
*Little backwards-compatibility.
*New versions of old familiar tools that remove all those pesky progress displays and status indicators, so you have no idea whether the program is actually doing anything or not (because that's none of your business). For example, the new checkdisk and defrag.
*A complete new set of security holes for virusus, adware, trojans, etc to exploit.
*The new "aero" interface, which is incompatible with almost everything non-Microsoft.

Windows Vista is also known as Microsoft's latest attempt to create a product worse than windows ME.


lmao!

It's spelt "focaccia", isn't it?

Anyway, what's a box got to do with bread?

Apple needs to sue these folks for making Apple's OS X work in such a sweat shop... it's not far to the best OS in the land!

Why ANYONE interested in a Mac would spend $3.00 on this is beyond me. Just load Windoz and be done with it.

Apr 30, 08 - 03:45 pm Comment from: Ampar

Lousy; screwed up; washed up; (vulg., shitty, crappy, full of shit (vulg.); (adj.) farkakt פֿאַרקאַקט
Approximate pronunciation (Northern Yiddish / Southern Yiddish): far∙kakt'

Apr 30, 08 - 03:49 pm Comment from: Demon

Back in the Day, I worked at Microage's Integration Center and assembled and customized ten's of Thousands of PCs, Macs and UNIX systems and servers. I can still spot and cheap poorly assembled system from 10 miles away. This is a cheap 32 Bit legacy board with 32bit PCI slots that you'll never be able to add a PCI cards to and have any confidence that they'll work, this is assuming of course that you can find PCI drivers for MacOSX. There is so many 8 and 16 bit legacy chips and subsystems on the board that it looses 30% of it's performance in bus bottle-necks. The lowest end Mac Mini will most likely run circles around the Psystar cheap box.
The first calls to Apple Tech support that they get on these cheap systems will be the end of Psystar. I even put money on Psystar starting to referring tech support issues to Apple after they've been shipping these systems for at most 90days. It'll take them that long to figure out that support cost money and lot's of it, when you're selling cheap computers. Just talk to Michael Dell about the cost of supporting a cheap low end system compared to a high end system. You'll find the cheap system costs you 50 to 100 times more to support then a high end system does.

There's still not enough journalists asking the questions I want answered: who are these people behind Psystar, and what are their motives?

You've got this Psystar company which appears out of the blue, haphazardly changes their address info a few times (while blatantly lying about a "recent change of address"), and claims to be selling computers in violation of the licenses of both Apple and the programmer who came up with the EFI firmware hack. Psystar's first impression comes across as both shady and amateurish. If all they did was steal peoples' credit card info, it wouldn't be much more than an unusually high-profile internet scam.

But if they're actually shipping working machines, that changes things significantly. They're not just taking peoples' money, they're building and shipping working computers to customers. And they apparently aren't too concerned about copyrights or the legal ramifications of what they're doing.

I'm starting to wonder if Psystar has any shadowy ties to the folks who make money from organized cybercrime. They can't be blind to the trend away from Windows toward OS X, and OS X isn't the laughably easy target for exploitation that Windows is.

So instead, they manufacture and sell cheapish Mac clones which come preinstalled with a modified version of OS X. They make it so the OS can't be updated via Apple's normal system updates, instead picking and choosing updates and listing them on their website. This could allow for some "hacked" Darwin files under the hood (which are provided courtesy of their preinstallation) to steal users' personal/financial information, participate in spam botnets, etc. - perpetuating the status quo they're accustomed to on the Windows side of things.

Yes, this may be in the realms of wild speculation, but this whole Psystar thing has been bothering me ever since the story broke, and this is one of the few scenarios I can think of that fits what we know so far. I sincerely hope that some enterprising tech reporter will take the time to carefully compare Psystar's preinstalled Leopard with the real thing, to see what's different.

MW: big, as in this story doesn't seem to be getting smaller anytime soon.

I just puked in my mouth a little.

Apr 30, 08 - 04:44 pm Comment from: John

eeeewww, it has a parallel printer port!!!!!!!

Apr 30, 08 - 04:48 pm Comment from: HolyMackerel

Apple's silence on this is deafening. Maybe they are happy to have a retail sale of MacOS X on an obviously limited PC that they will never have to support in warranty or upgrades and gets some of the experience into the hands of the PC geeks who refuse to fully switch.

Maybe it is MS who should be worried about Psystar.

It's the same reason that Apple is silent about all of the Hacintosh pages out there. Once people see what a Hackintosh is all about and how bad the performance and stability is, the problem will solve itself.

"So instead, they manufacture and sell cheapish Mac clones which come preinstalled with a modified version of OS X. They make it so the OS can't be updated via Apple's normal system updates, instead picking and choosing updates and listing them on their website. "

This is absolutely not true. It is a regular, out of the box, vanilla copy of 10.5. The hack, which was developed BY the OSX86 boys is to the EFI which allows standard Leopard to install and run....

Since Mac "Box assemblers" use standard PC parts (Intel, GeForce, Radeon) there are no driver issues if you build the clone right..

What you end up with is a machine that is fully expandable and faster for 1/2 the price (or more of a Mac)... Of course, The Fanboys here could case less about expandability and performance. What's REALLY important to them is that their computers "LOOK" sexy and delicious!

Of course, Apple could easily "break" it with their next software update. Just as easily they could allow it to update if they wanted to,,, But they will break it. Who would ever by a Mac when you can get 3 times the machine for half the price..

Focacta:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=focacta

Apr 30, 08 - 05:19 pm Comment from: phantasmosxmagnum

Hmm, no Firewire standard not too expensive to add on but no iLife??!! What kinda Mac or Mac Clone wouldn't be caught dead w/o iLife preinstalled!! Wait, maybe if they were like really old, obsolete, pre-G3 and or used off of eBay!! BTW I've gotten much better boxes from eBay shipping old stuff! LOL

Apr 30, 08 - 05:25 pm Comment from: phantasmosxmagnum

OK, I missed it at first but Psystar is authorized to offer OS X 10.5X software updates that are pre-approved by testing done by Psystar. Hmm, where's the Apple lawyers? LOL Oh wait, I'll bet they're waiting for a couple of hundred of them to go out then break 'em with a software update time bomb style or they'll force Psystar to refund all of their customers money after the boxes go south and force them to send 'em Mac Mini's to replace 'em!

Apr 30, 08 - 05:27 pm Comment from: HMCIV

Apple's lack of response to Psystar tells me new owners are sitting on a ticking time bomb much like <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080430112525.htm"> except way dumber.

Apr 30, 08 - 05:28 pm Comment from: HMCIV

Yeah and next time I'll proof read my HTML. I wonder if M$ is hiring?

Apr 30, 08 - 05:37 pm Comment from: Petey

God that is one ugly designed mac.

Makes you realise how great Apple's designs are.

Goodluck trying to update the OS on that shitbox.

I bet Apple adds some update when means you wont be able to install any apple updates on non apple hardware.