« Obama underscores commitment to restoring fairness to the tax code, $1.2 billion dollars in tax credits for Wisconsin working families | Main | It's Not the News. It's the Packaging »
April 15, 2009
Apple Clone Company Pystar Surviving One - year of Apple litigation
It's been a year since Psystar began selling Mac clones in defiance of Apple. Today, the essential question regarding Psystar is unchanged: does the company have the right to sell computers with Apple'sMac OS X Leopard preinstalled, as it has been doing since April 14, 2008? Psystar set off shock waves through the Apple world that week, as an army of journalists, bloggers, fanboys, and detractors set off on a manic search for anything and everything related to the company and its desktops. Psystar emerged a year ago as a small independent system builder, the likes of which can be found in any medium-size town in the U.S. What provoked the interest and ire of the Maccommunity was Psystar's decision to ship so-called "white box" systems with Mac OS preinstalled alongside systems withWindows Vista and Linux, in defiance of Apple's licensing policies for that operating system. Psystar recently updated its flagship product, the Open Computer, and CEO Rudy Pedraza promises that more products are yet to come. In an interview, Pedraza acknowledged that the past year has been quite a challenge, but he's glad that at least so far, Psystar has been able to provide an alternative to Apple. "(Our customers) are people who would otherwise be unable to afford an Apple computer, and they are just happy about it."Will Apple's software license be overturned by the courts? Apple needs a wake up call as my personal experience is that there quality, reliability are slipping and they are losing the edge of product superiority. In the last 3 months, I have replaced two IPhone that failed. My two-year old MacBook has had three repairs in three weeks , 2 logic boards and failed RAM. My IPod crashed right after the extended warranty ended. My Macbook Pro has had performance issues that Apple does not seem to be able to fix. So what's going with the competition?
One year ago, an otherwise sleepy April in the Apple universe was turned upside down by a tiny company from Southern Florida, kicking off a real-world Clone War between Apple and Psystar.
Comments