Clutching At Straws – The Newest Apple Tactic Against Cloners

During the time I have been involved with computers, there have been several would-be competitors to Apple, but none has held on as long as Florida company Psystar.

In the early days, the cloning revolved around building a similar motherboard, and then actually physically copying the ROMs  of the Apple machine. Though I never was interested in an Apple clone during those times, I do remember machines being sold in the back of certain magazines (none of which exist in paper form today, and most don’t exist at all) that you purchased complete, minus the boot ROMs, which you were told upfront you would need to supply. The idea behind this was that the prospective user had a friend that would allow his boot ROM to be removed from his machine, and copied, thereby allowing the friend to boot his “Mac”. It was much after this started that someone applied the term Hackintosh, to describe the bastardized Apple clone.

I’m not sure if it is because I am less concerned these days, or if Psystar really is getting away with more than any of the early cloners. The latest claims by Apple seem especially convoluted, as the story from slashdot details -

“Groklaw has an extensive look at the latest developments in the Psystar vs. Apple story. There’s a nice picture illustrating the accusation by Apple that Psystar makes three unauthorized copies of OS X. The most interesting, however, is the last copy. From Apple’s brief: ‘Finally, every time Psystar turns on any of the Psystar computers running Mac OS X, which it does before shipping each computer, Psystar necessarily makes a separate modified copy of Mac OS X in Random Access Memory, or RAM. This is the third unlawful copy.’ Psystar’s response: ‘Copying a computer program into RAM as a result of installing and running that program is precisely the copying that Section 117 provides does not constitute copyright infringement for an owner of a computer program. As the Ninth Circuit explained, permitting copies like this was Section 117’s purpose.’ Is Apple seriously arguing that installing a third party program and booting OS X results in copyright infringement due to making a derivative work and an unauthorized copy?”

I think we are seeing the last attempts to keep OS X from becoming something sold on Newegg alongside Windows 7. I think it would be a huge hit, and since Apple has so many “i” products to generate ridiculous profit margins, it really doesn’t need to have the huge margins on Macs.

Still, though I am no lawyer, I have never understood why the company can not simply state that its software cannot be untied from hardware that comes from Cupertino and that’s the end of it. This is perhaps one of those things that should be rectified by an overhaul of the legal system.

Psystar is certainly taking this for a ride. The Rebel EFI, software that was to have allowed x86 computers to run OS X, no matter what, seems to have been overhyped to the extreme. Still, it probably works well if you use the genuine Intel motherboards that Apple does, and keep your video card choices to those found in a genuine Apple machine.

I’m certain it is advancing age that causes my lack of enthusiasm for the Hackintosh of today, as the very next update from Apple is bound to destroy the ability to do certain things, like boot, since the intent of Apple is to keep OS X on Apple hardware alone. Had Rebel EFI been widely acclaimed, I was thinking about it, but now, the precarious position of worrying day-to-day if the machine stops working is too much trouble for saving a few bucks.

Update 2PM PST - PC World has just brought out the story that apple has broken off another way for Hackintosh assembly, by removing the ability of OS X 10.6.2 to run on Atom CPUs -

Apple is reportedly breaking Hackintoshes — meaning netbooks illegimately installed with Mac OS X — with its latest update to Leopard.

The current developer build of OS X — 10.6.2 — will not run on the Intel Atom processor commonly used in netbooks that ship with Windows or Linux, according to an account in Wired, attributing the report to a hacker named Stellarola.

“Apple appears to have changed around a lot of CPU-related information” in the build, says Stellarola. “One of the effects of this is Apple killing off Intel’s Atom chip.”

Stellarola suggests that while most Hackintosh users should stick with 10.6 for now, they might try upgrading to 10.6.2 if they’re running an older or modified kernel, according to OS X Daily.

The software in question is only a developer build, and it still might change before Apple releases a real update.

So, not 12 hours pass and what I spoke of occurs. That, along with the story about the unsuccessful use of Psystar’s Rebel EFI on ZDNet tends to make any proposition iffy at best.

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Quote of the day:

What we call ‘Progress’ is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance. - Havelock Ellis

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