German company PearC begins selling line of Mac clones

[braincell]

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/ ... ones-1.ars

[darkrezin]

Ugh, not again

I hope these companies that try to profit from free community knowledge and programming get what they deserve.

[astroman]

not even Apple builds Macs anymore - today they sell computers
btw a 20" aluminium iMac 2.4G is 998 Euro in Germany,
including (mighty) mouse and (alu) keyboard,
OS and a bunch of apps to make 90% of the home and small office users happy.
just 1 power cable and the keyboard connection (possibly a network cable) keeps your desk neat

why would you to annoy yourself day after day with the view of that loud and ugly thing that's barely 100 bucks cheaper, if at all ?

compared to what they delivered 20 years ago, Apple's products pretty much s*ck today.
Yet they still have the most easy operability on the market...

cheers, Tom

[darkrezin]

Hey Tom,

There's a hole in Apple's line-up for a mid-range desktop that can take PCIe cards and extra hard drives etc. Not everyone needs the heat/noise of an 8-core xeon.

I built a hack with a quad-core Q6600, 8GB RAM, 2x 500GB drives, nice Lian-Li case etc for around £600, which is waaayyy less than the price of an iMac here, and which smokes the iMac on performance. My old RME PCI card even works in it. It has more slots and is more versatile than a Mac Pro.

iMacs have inherent problems for serious use - everything has to be USB/firewire, and bus traffic problems can be a serious issue. It's also a PITA to change the hard drive outside the warranty period. The hardware is really low quality these days - my Mac Mini's DVD drive is already dead and the sound chip sometimes dies intermittently. Therefore, dropping £2k on a Mac Pro was just not a risk i was willing to take.

There are certain methods you can use for a 'vanilla' kernel (non-hacked), with easy OS updates that don't require extra messing around.

The thing is that the hackintosh scene is built on community efforts that are strictly intended for personal, non-commercial use. When a company starts making commercial products out of it, it endangers the whole scene.

[braincell]

I don't find Microsoft to be more difficult to use than the Mac OS and it uses mostly the exact same software which functions identically. I haven't used Logic in a long time but it was not easy. There was no logic to Logic.

[Neutron]

I just read today that Psystar has won the right to sue apple for breaching some copyright law (like windows bundling IE with windows i guess)
and maybe the floodgates will be opened for anyone to put OSX on a PC.

All i know for sure is that no matter who wins or loses. lawyers win.

[braincell]

If anyone could legally buy OSX and install it on any computer, then consumers would win.

[valis]

Hey Tom,

There's a hole in Apple's line-up for a mid-range desktop that can take PCIe cards and extra hard drives etc. Not everyone needs the heat/noise of an 8-core xeon.

I built a hack with a quad-core Q6600, 8GB RAM, 2x 500GB drives, nice Lian-Li case etc for around £600, which is waaayyy less than the price of an iMac here, and which smokes the iMac on performance. My old RME PCI card even works in it. It has more slots and is more versatile than a Mac Pro.

iMacs have inherent problems for serious use - everything has to be USB/firewire, and bus traffic problems can be a serious issue. It's also a PITA to change the hard drive outside the warranty period. The hardware is really low quality these days - my Mac Mini's DVD drive is already dead and the sound chip sometimes dies intermittently. Therefore, dropping £2k on a Mac Pro was just not a risk i was willing to take.

There are certain methods you can use for a 'vanilla' kernel (non-hacked), with easy OS updates that don't require extra messing around.

The thing is that the hackintosh scene is built on community efforts that are strictly intended for personal, non-commercial use. When a company starts making commercial products out of it, it endangers the whole scene.

I agree with darkrezin about the lack of a mid-range Mac. The iMac is a sort of 'executive' or 'aging college professor' product for the desktop market, with 'normal' minitower/desktop computers left as a "dirty commons for the PC users". It's been that way for years, but in terms of functionality there's a huge gap between the mac-mini, the iMac and a Mac Pro.

Also I agree that these companies that are commercially exploiting the community-created methods for doing a "hackintosh" are not doing anyone any good but themselves. This endangers the scene not only because of the legal issues it exposes the "hackintosh" tool creators to, but because the original creator(s) have been driven by no commercial gain and their efforts are being completely exploited.

I don't find Microsoft to be more difficult to use than the Mac OS and it uses mostly the exact same software which functions identically. I haven't used Logic in a long time but it was not easy. There was no logic to Logic.

braincell, building a hackintosh to the point where it even runs properlyh takes many hours of effort, and even longer to tweak it into place for any kind of daily use. For an average computer user, a hackintosh gives hardware that's got wider compatibility & more options (PCI, more onboard ports, wider array of cpu's & memory support etc) and you learn a LOT more about OSX in the process.

The lack of options from Apple doesn't excuse the unethical use of what these companies did NOT create, though I do think that the personal use scene is a bit of a free area. If people weren't able to use machines in way companies didn't initially intend, I think we'd be missing entire swaths of our musical culture (and more).

I love Logic personally, were I to move entirely to Cubase I'd probably dump half the gear in here as it's too much bother to use with Cubase. But that's horses for courses...

[valis]

If anyone could legally buy OSX and install it on any computer, then consumers would win.

Right now you can legally buy OSX, but it is unfortunately in the EULA that you can only use it on an Apple Mac. There is also a copy protection mechanism in the OS, and then there's Apple's copyright "rights" in general (still a very murky issue). All three of these can potentially come into play when trying to take the 'legal' route to opening up OSX.

And as has been stated above, legal or not these companies are using unethical means to bypass OSX's protections.

There IS supposedly a usb-based EFI enabler that will allow a "hackintosh" to work without even bypassing the OS protections, but I have no idea what they did in creating if it actually avoids legal issues or not. Hopefully it's not the same "hack" that is already in use for hackintosh just packaged into a bootable usb loader before the OS.

All that said, I would actually be thrilled to see OSX run on vanilla PC hardware. I'm sure Apple fans would be even more dismayed, but I don't see any real downside to having another strong BSD desktop alternative running on retail hardware.

[Shroomz~>]

I don't have any ethical issues with the whole hackintosh concept or scene since ultimately, Apple have made a lot of self inflicted mistakes in their product evolution & that combined with their perhaps unethical attempts to keep their OS's restricted to their own hardware has been sickeningly restricting for a lot of mac users. As darkrezin pointed out though, it's not ethical for people to be profiting from the hard work of the hackintosh community. Stealing ideas for commercial profit is one thing, since that's been commonplace for a long time in various forms (original ideas are few & far between after all), but if these companies are actually stealing other people's work for their own profit, then it's definitely a completely different story.

[astroman]

... I agree with darkrezin about the lack of a mid-range Mac. The iMac is a sort of 'executive' or 'aging college professor' product for the desktop market, with 'normal' minitower/desktop computers left as a "dirty commons for the PC users". It's been that way for years, but in terms of functionality there's a huge gap between the mac-mini, the iMac and a Mac Pro...

absolutely correct - and not exactly surprising

those 'missing' machines assured the company's survival for more than a decade
then sacked by Apple for the sake of cash flow - people used to use them way too long
No kidding, but one of the local newspapers here had a 'special' system in their print facility driven by Macs running OS 7 until 2 years ago

and failure rates of Mac Minis are indeed ridulous compared to 'original' Apple machines.

cheers, Tom

[garyb]

the mid range computer is handled by the "pc".