[Updated 8/04] Apple Sues Unauthorized Clone Maker Psystar

[Bazenga]

Forgive my ignorance about Apple, but why people are refereing "Apple hardware"? When did apple start manufacturing hardware :s ? Isn't the hardware found in an Apple computer the exact same found in other, like Dell or HP or whatever?

[shihchiun]

Apple allows you to install Windows and Linux, but NO, Apple will never allow you to install OSX on a windows PC. I hope Psystar wins. Also apple should allow Windows users to install OSX but will certain hardware specifications.

Why? Apple created OS X, and as far as I'm concerned they can do what they want with it, as long as they're not shoving it down everyone's throats. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate being told what you can and cannot do with something you've created, so why should a company have to do something it clearly does not want to do?

the prices one pays for one of these toys deserves better faster hardware. the smallest macbook costs almost twice as much as the cheaper windows notebook with comparable hardware

But not everyone is just looking at hardware when they buy a computer. Most people buy Apple computers for the whole "experience," not just the hardware. You may feel it's overpriced (and I would agree), but clearly there are a lot of people who are perfectly fine with what Apple charges.

Forgive my ignorance about Apple, but why people are refereing "Apple hardware"? When did apple start manufacturing hardware confused.gif ? Isn't the hardware found in an Apple computer the exact same found in other, like Dell or HP or whatever?

No, Apple doesn't literally make it's own hardware. People are referring to the specific models Apple sells - the MacBook, the Mac Pro, the iMac, etc. The components may be the same, but the packaging is different.

[chrisj1968]

Why? Apple created OS X, and as far as I'm concerned they can do what they want with it, as long as they're not shoving it down everyone's throats. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate being told what you can and cannot do with something you've created, so why should a company have to do something it clearly does not want to do?

But not everyone is just looking at hardware when they buy a computer. Most people buy Apple computers for the whole "experience," not just the hardware. You may feel it's overpriced (and I would agree), but clearly there are a lot of people who are perfectly fine with what Apple charges.

No, Apple doesn't literally make it's own hardware. People are referring to the specific models Apple sells - the MacBook, the Mac Pro, the iMac, etc. The components may be the same, but the packaging is different.

the experience? so you mean you'd buy a car for the experience and not the car? what I'm seeing in Apples pricing is, they charge you porsche prices for a VW vehicle. 120GB harddrives are way too small. people collect pictures, their itunes..this adds up to alot of harddrive space needs.

[Impact]

The "experience" everyone is talking about is being able to pull their notebook out everyday and have everything work so seamlessly, they don't even have to think about lots of things that you would have to with a windows notebook. For example, with a pc notebook, if you had a wireless mouse, you would have to turn it on and off every time you put your notebook away or took it out. With a mac, every time you sleep or wake your notebook (if you have a mighty mouse), it turns the mouse on and off for you. Also, I have been AMAZINGLY impressed with how easy and quick the sleep is on my Macbook. Shut the lid and its already sleeping. Open it up, and it's already awake and ready to use.

[Richard Hammond]

The "experience" everyone is talking about is being able to pull their notebook out everyday and have everything work so seamlessly, they don't even have to think about lots of things that you would have to with a windows notebook. For example, with a pc notebook, if you had a wireless mouse, you would have to turn it on and off every time you put your notebook away or took it out. With a mac, every time you sleep or wake your notebook (if you have a mighty mouse), it turns the mouse on and off for you. Also, I have been AMAZINGLY impressed with how easy and quick the sleep is on my Macbook. Shut the lid and its already sleeping. Open it up, and it's already awake and ready to use.

You can do all that with a Windows notebook.

[sanctified Veteran]

the experience? so you mean you'd buy a car for the experience and not the car? what I'm seeing in Apples pricing is, they charge you porsche prices for a VW vehicle. 120GB harddrives are way too small. people collect pictures, their itunes..this adds up to alot of harddrive space needs.

You are analizing Apple hardware with a Windows mentality. Thats the problem, your needs tells you that Apple its overpriced, and thats true, its overpriced for you.

Apple hardware last longer, why? Because Apple's closed hardware scheme and how the os its optimized for those specific hardware configurations helps the hardware to works always with optimized specific code in exchange for wider upgradeability. You need to understand that in most conditions mentality its totally different. You pay a lot less for your PC but in exchange you upgrade it more frequently and it last less, but that doesnt make Apple better or Windows machines worse, they are just tools.

Just minutes ago I commented to an user using a 400mhz G3 machine, using Panther as his main OS, he used the machine for common tasks perfectly. How many Windows pc's at 400mhz are still working with a farily new OS? Do you want to compare Panther with Windows 98?

Again, not saying Apple hardware its better, its just used differently and it gives you possibilities that Windows pcs dont give you just the same as those Windows pcs that let you do things that Apple ones dont.

[Joel]

Oh get over yourself - that's like complaining about a mobo mfctr. "forcing" you to use their BIOS...

A BIOS is not a fully functioning OS you can buy in a store.

Apple hardware last longer, why? Because Apple's closed hardware scheme and how the os its optimized for those specific hardware configurations helps the hardware to works always with optimized specific code in exchange for wider upgradeability.

Are you saying that the same HD lasts longer running OSX than Windows? :rolleyes:

[sanctified Veteran]

Are you saying that the same HD lasts longer running OSX than Windows? :rolleyes:

OS X's Journaling helps. Its not a day/night like difference but it certainly helps. Are you going to nitpick my post just to prove me wrong? :huh:

[Richard Hammond]

You are analizing Apple hardware with a Windows mentality. Thats the problem, your needs tells you that Apple its overpriced, and thats true, its overpriced for you.

Its not overpriced for some people, the fact is its overpriced compared to similar spec machines.

Apple hardware last longer, why? Because Apple's closed hardware scheme and how the os its optimized for those specific hardware configurations helps the hardware to works always with optimized specific code in exchange for wider upgradeability. You need to understand that in most conditions mentality its totally different. You pay a lot less for your PC but in exchange you upgrade it more frequently and it last less, but that doesnt make Apple better or Windows machines worse, they are just tools.

What like Yellowing plastics, cracking plastics, faulty screens, faulty fans that moo, that require 3-4 revisions before its worth purchasing a machine?

Just minutes ago I commented to an user using a 400mhz G3 machine, using Panther as his main OS, he used the machine for common tasks perfectly. How many Windows pc's at 400mhz are still working with a farily new OS? Do you want to compare Panther with Windows 98?

I have a 2nd PC that is a P3 633 machine that i use regularly running Windows XP with 512mb of ram and i dont have any problems, neither does my friend who runs a P3 450, in fact i have several friends and family and friends of my family who run 5+ year old hardware without issues.

[sanctified Veteran]

What like Yellowing plastics, cracking plastics, faulty screens, faulty fans that moo, that require 3-4 revisions before its worth purchasing a machine?

Name a hardware developer that doesnt have faults, just one, please.

I have a P3 633 machine that i use regularly running Windows XP with 512mb of ram and i dont have any problems, neither does my friend who runs a P3 450, in fact i have several friends and family and friends of my family who run 5+ year old hardware without issues.

Great, you know some, the fact remains that in percentage Apple computers have a longer lifespan. BTW, the g3 I mentioned its 10 years old, not 5 ;)

But you know what, reading your post in this thread its obvious you only want to read about how apple its crap and the users are stupids, so here you go: Apple its crap, you are right, everyone its an idiot, and every people has the SAME computer needs :) hope you are happy.

Im off this thread, Im not really interested in changing your mind really, I just thought we could use reason for a change, I was wrong. I will continue using the tools I need while you all fight about what the rest of the world should use because you like it.

[Richard Hammond]

Name a hardware developer that doesnt have faults, just one, please.

None, but when i buy hardware i dont have to wait for it to go through a few revisions before i should even think about buying it

Great, you know some, the fact remains that in percentage Apple computers have a longer lifespan. BTW, the g3 I mentioned its 10 years old, not 5 ;)

I thought the G3 was comparable to P3 hence the name, both peices of hardware are similar in performance and both out in a similar timeframe.

But you know what, reading your post in this thread its obvious you only want to read about how apple its crap and the users are stupids, so here you go: Apple its crap, you are right, everyone its an idiot, and every people has the SAME computer needs :) hope you are happy.

It has nothing to do with that, but it can work both ways, im sick of reading the smug stuck up attitude of people who own Mac hardware who talk about it like Steve Jobs pulled it out of his ass and polished it up just for them, that Mac hardware is superior and OSX is the best OS ever and its well worth paying 25%+ over compareable PC hardware just because its all shiny.

Im off this thread, Im not really interested in changing your mind really, I just thought we could use reason for a change, I was wrong. I will continue using the tools I need while you all fight about what the rest of the world should use because you like it.

Thats a shame, its refreshing to hear logical well though out argument instead of both sides saying each other hardware sucks.

[Joel]

OS X's Journaling helps. Its not a day/night like difference but it certainly helps. Are you going to nitpick my post just to prove me wrong? :huh:

You said if a machine runs OSX, the hardware lasts longer. Am I right? If so, back it up. Show me real-world examples of this, where any failure of hardware could be attributed to which OS the machine was running.

[FloatingFatMan]

lol, I know people who have Macs, and are far from rich.

That's because they bought a Mac. Bet they were rich beforehand! :p

[sanctified Veteran]

None, but when i buy hardware i dont have to wait for it to go through a few revisions before i should even think about buying it

I thought the G3 was comparable to P3 hence the name, both peices of hardware are similar in performance.

It has nothing to do with that, but it can work both ways, im sick of reading the smug stuck up attitude of people who own Mac hardware who talk about it like Steve Jobs pulled it out of his ass and polished it up just for them, that Mac hardware is superior and OSX is the best OS ever and its well worth paying 50%+ over compareable PC hardware just because its all shiny.

Thats a shame, its refreshing to hear logical well though out argument instead of both sides saying each other hardware sucks.

The G3 its comparable not because the speeds but because the IBM architechture (Cant remember the damn name). For example at that time a 400mhz G3 chip was comparable to a p3 at 700mhz, of course all the benchmarks at the time were made using Apple code with the G3 and MS code with the P3. To this date I dont know if raw power was compared.

Paying 50% (and sometimes up to 70%) for a shinier product its not worthy. For me it was a decission of money (yes, money, I will explain myself) and OS X but I do agree, paying extra for status its naive at best and idiotic at worst. Buying an Apple machine it was an investment for me exactly because the lifespan (I did quite a research about that). Im not rich, in fact Im far from it so I needed to have a reliable machine for my line of work (Design and photograhy) that its portable and will last at least 7 years (yes :p) because I dont have the money to do constant upgrades or change machines often. There used to be a time where I had Windows machines, great systems that ran everything I threw to them but the hardware scheme, gaming and general component life made me to change or to upgrade every 2 years or so. I think I easily spent 4000 to 5000 bucks in hardware in about 3 years. Now I have a lappy, it will last me more than that, it costed me half of that cash and I can rest asure that all the code inside this machine its made specially for it. Im not saying that OS X its better, hell, I madly loved XP for example, when I used to be a mode I wrote easly 5 guides about customizing it, those where great times :p

[sanctified Veteran]

You said if a machine runs OSX, the hardware lasts longer. Am I right? If so, back it up. Show me real-world examples of this, where any failure of hardware could be attributed to which OS the machine was running.

I said the lifespan its longer, meaning that due software schemes an Apple computer needs less upgrades because the software on it its not as demanding/its more optimized. You can run Tiger (OS X 10.4.11, a 3 years old system and the OS update its less than a year old) on a G3 at 400mhz with 512 ram perfectly (10 years old system). Can you run Vista on a pentium 3 machine? Maybe you can but as fast?

Hardware degrades indeed, its unavoidable but depending how you use it (both phisically and internally) it can last longer.

[ViperAFK]

I said the lifespan its longer, meaning that due software schemes an Apple computer needs less upgrades because the software on it its not as demanding/its more optimized. You can run Tiger (OS X 10.4.11, a 3 years old system and the OS update its less than a year old) on a G3 at 400mhz with 512 ram perfectly (10 years old system). Can you run Vista on a pentium 3 machine? Maybe you can but as fast?

Hardware degrades indeed, its unavoidable but depending how you use it (both phisically and internally) it can last longer.

you kind of destroyed your own argument "but can you as fast" same applies to OSX I have used OSX on everything from a new core2 imac with 2 gb ram to a 400mhz powerpc imac, OSX was dog slow on that thing as vista would be on a p3.

OSX is pretty well optimized but it's not going to run much better than vista on such an old machine.

[sanctified Veteran]

you kind of destroyed your own argument "but can you as fast" same applies to OSX I have used OSX on everything from a new core2 imac with 2 gb ram to a 400mhz powerpc imac, OSX was dog slow on that thing as vista would be on a p3.

OSX is pretty well optimized but it's not going to run much better than vista on such an old machine.

It depends the OS X version you tried. Your experience was using Leopard? It all boils down to experience of course, one experience dont nullify another one. I have tried g3 and g4 machines using Tiger and they were fast using common day apps but I would recommend those machines for 3d modelling.

[jesseinsf]

The fact is that they're a hardware company and that's where they get the majority of their revenue. It's a totally different business model from Microsoft.

I prefer Blackberry OS over WinMo, but why can't RIM license it to other hardware?

Apple uses the same GPU, CPU and Memory as all other mainsteam operating systems use. It's the motherboard that is 100% exclusive for Apple computers. I can buy the same exact graphics card for use with windows, use the same processor for windows that mac uses and use the same memory that mac uses. In other words you can pull out the Graphics card, CPU, and memory from a mac and use it on a PC. It all works the same from exact comparable hardware too. So this says that it's just the Motherboard that is 100% Apple designed.

Oh, and don't say that apple pays Intel more to get the better batch of the same processor that OEM companies get to make PCs. That would be illegal. Intel would have to make a Mac spacific processor and call it a different name in order to be legal.

[giga Veteran]

Apple uses the same GPU, CPU and Memory as all other mainsteam operating systems use. It's the motherboard that is 100% exclusive for Apple computers. I can buy the same exact graphics card for use with windows, use the same processor for windows that mac uses and use the same memory that mac uses. In other words you can pull out the Graphics card, CPU, and memory from a mac and use it on a PC. It all works the same from exact comparable hardware too. So this says that it's just the Motherboard that is 100% Apple designed.

Oh, and don't say that apple pays Intel more to get the better batch of the same processor that OEM companies get to make PCs. That would be illegal. Intel would have to make a Mac spacific processor and call it a different name in order to be legal.

What's your point? Of course they use the same gpu/cpu/memory, but you can't count out the external hardware of an Apple computer. The appeal of a mac doesn't come from its performance, but from its design and operating system--that's it.

[ViperAFK]

It depends the OS X version you tried. Your experience was using Leopard? It all boils down to experience of course, one experience dont nullify another one. I have tried g3 and g4 machines using Tiger and they were fast using common day apps but I would recommend those machines for 3d modelling.

I have used one with tiger and another with nearly the same specs with leopard, they were both really slow, although the tiger one was definitely faster.

[shihchiun]

the experience? so you mean you'd buy a car for the experience and not the car? what I'm seeing in Apples pricing is, they charge you porsche prices for a VW vehicle. 120GB harddrives are way too small. people collect pictures, their itunes..this adds up to alot of harddrive space needs.

Um... the "experience" refers to the experience of using the thing, not literally the experience of the act of purchasing something. When most people buy a Mac they look at the overall big picture of owning and using the machine (the experience), not just the hardware specs. You know, the whole "It just works!" thing, not needing antivirus, etc.

To use the car analogy... a car that goes 0 to 60 in 2 seconds is great, but not if there's a 12-step startup process and the brakes randomly stop working. Most people would prefer a car that works all the time and is easy to use, even if it takes 10 seconds to go from 0 to 60. That's the difference.

A computer is more than its hardware. For $1000, you could buy a Dell that's twice as fast as an equivalently priced Mac (probably not literally...), but what good is the hardware if you hate using Windows?

[giga Veteran]

I have used one with tiger and another with nearly the same specs with leopard, they were both really slow, although the tiger one was definitely faster.

Leopard is by far faster than Tiger. Improvements in Spotlight, Finder, application caching, disk i/o, and optimization. Consider Siracusa from Ars: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/15

Each new version of Mac OS X has been faster on the same hardware than its predecessor. I've said as much in my reviews, but the definition of "faster" is admittedly nebulous when applied to an entire operating system.

There are at least two important ways that an OS gets "faster." The first is traditional code optimization, where some subsystem is improved to use less CPU time or less memory or do less disk i/o, thus performing the same task in less time. The second factor is perceived speed. Though a task may actually take longer, it may feel faster due to changes in the way the OS reacts during the process.

Application launching is the canonical example that combines both. You can time how long it takes for an application to finish launching, giving you a measurement of actual performance. The perceived performance, on the other hand, has more to do with the number of bounces the Dock icon makes, when the first application window begins to draw itself, and whether there's a beach ball cursor at any time during the process.

Leopard, like its predecessors, gets faster on the same hardware in both areas. Frameworks have been extensively revised and optimized, yielding real performance benefits in the areas of screen drawing (2D or 3D), text display, and most of the features that were new in Tiger.

In particular, Spotlight's improvement has been revelatory. Maybe it will degrade with time, but after a few months of usage it's still lightning fast. I've actually been too lazy to install Quicksilver on each new Leopard seed, relying instead on Spotlight as a quick launcher?something that would be inconceivable to me in Tiger. And Leopard is not getting off easy by just indexing a clean install. No, it's indexing all 2+ million of my files.

Most bundled applications get a boost of speed in Leopard, if only in the seemingly universally less disk-intensive launch process. One Dock bounce, a few hard drive clicks, and most applications are ready to go. I feel like I'm probably being cheated by yet more "bounce shaving," but the stopwatch bears it out, if only by fractional seconds in most cases.

[Richard Hammond]

Um... the "experience" refers to the experience of using the thing, not literally the experience of the act of purchasing something. When most people buy a Mac they look at the overall big picture of owning and using the machine (the experience), not just the hardware specs. You know, the whole "It just works!" thing, not needing antivirus, etc.

To use the car analogy... a car that goes 0 to 60 in 2 seconds is great, but not if there's a 12-step startup process and the brakes randomly stop working. Most people would prefer a car that works all the time and is easy to use, even if it takes 10 seconds to go from 0 to 60. That's the difference.

A computer is more than its hardware. For $1000, you could buy a Dell that's twice as fast as an equivalently priced Mac (probably not literally...), but what good is the hardware if you hate using Windows?

You know what im sick of the condescending attitudes Mac users have when they look down on Windows users, ive been using Vista since the betas and ive not had one single problem, any issues with Vista was a result of me messing around and doing things i shouldnt need to be doing. All this "it just works" is a load of B.S.

[shihchiun]

If I come across as being elitist and condescending toward Windows users, well, that was not my intention. FYI, I happily use Windows XP on my main machine. Why not Vista? Because I don't want to buy new hardware to run it properly. I get what people are saying about the hardware being overpriced, but for many people that's not the main concern when buying a computer.

[Richard Hammond]

I didnt mean to pick on you personally, i mean in general the "it just works" nonsense people come out with really annoys me.