Comments on: Week in review: Psystar and the Mac minions

A saga surrounding Mac clone maker Psystar grabs the attention of Macdom. And news from three tech bellwethers offers reassurance.
(By CNET News.com's Leslie Katz)

[Fil0403]

Week in review: Psystar and the Mac sheeps

I find it rather interesting that so many (biased) people accuse Microsoft of monopolist and anti-competitive business models and, at the same time, praise Apple when it's Apple (not evil Microsoft) that forces everyone to buy a Mac to use their operating system and doesn't let anyone else use it. Tell me about anti-competitive business models. And the same business model is used with iPod/iTunes, or any other Apple product, for that matter. It's beacuse of business models and EULAs like this that Microsoft, with its (better-every-version-)Windows operating system, is and will continue to be the incontested market leader (with steady 90+% market share) and Apple, with its (less-and-less-secure-to-use-)Mac OS, is and will continue to be trailing way behind Microsoft with an insignificant market share (which, against what biased reports try to make believe, actually declined from 7.57% in January 2008 to 7.48% in March 2008, whereas Windows's raised from 91.50% to 91.57% in the same period of time - http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=9).

[technewsjunkie]

Take a business class

Please.

[Talinus]

Contradiction

You undercut your own argument (that Apple is using
monopolistic practices) by pointing out that Apple has less than
10% market share. 10% is not a monopoly.

Yes, all of their (sanctioned) OS X installs is on Apple hardware.
If you don't like it, buy a Windows PC.

Monopolistic practices are only monopolistic when there is a
monopoly. Apple does not have a monopoly, not in computers,
not in OSes, not even in online music sales.

[zeplin10ten]

hands off my trademark ... smile

I'm not sure I have this right ... but I think it was Madonna -- not the original metaphor girl, or the later one, the portrait model famous for her in-the-throes-of-an-immaculate-conception-labor smile, but the girl, version 1.9.5.8, brought to us by Sexpot Software of Bay City, Michigan -- who changed what keeping pinkies off a trademark smile might mean.

And that was a good thing at the oasis, since it allowed Julia Roberts, later, to have a good role as an unsure but smiling, out-of-place professor (with not exactly a Madonna smile, but the Hollywood equivalent) at the kind of school that produces, in real life apparently, tight-lipped presidential hopefuls with short, cocktail dress memories. "The Teacher Smile" might have been a tough sell to the studios.

How the girl from Bay City did it, or course, was by broadening the view of what a trademark smile is. Lurid? Liberating? Like the current, no bridge to the 21st century for intellectual property, it was both and neither. A zero-sum equation. The chains and cuffs were present for a reason. Physical bonds of a physical life in a physical world. Like the portrait model and the metaphor before her, the Bay City girl was imprisoned but in various and different ways, this time making money for it.

And what's a get-off on confinement for, now, but an excuse to supplicate the self before the beastie gewgaws of the past, without the need to grapple with the irony of a mind that's throwing up the images of submission, lust, and past?

Enter "intellectual property," a lusty oxymoron if ever there was one. That we, members of the hairy ape set with, oftentimes, a better sense of hygiene than our cousins at the zoo, are living lives made possible by the strange and furtive irony of living in our heads, outside the physical, postal address of the self, is hard to easily deny.

So clever with our hands that, in our head lives, we're making things we can't come close to seeing, hearing, touching. Using ideas of ideas, to make ideas of things that have a real presence, purpose, use -- uses we can't come close to fully using.

Enter the hind end of "intellectual property" -- a vast array of retooled, beastie poo. Oh, yes -- imposing power and control on creative, free-association has a great and glorious effect. And the people hanging on, still living not in their heads but deep inside their heart of pants-hearts, controlling things -- well, it's just the bees knees for the species.

Not possible for there to exist, together, personal reward and public sharing? Indie lives, lived together? Oh, no. We're way not clever enough for anything as complicated as that. Poor, widdle, Madonna smiling not us, thingies.

[Andy kaufman]

It's a Hackintosh!

Mac OSX can be hacked to run on non-Apple branded PCs and it is easier to do than you'd think.

Buy a $399 Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc and run Mac OSX on it if you want.

[Andy kaufman]

It's not a monopoly when Apple does it!

It is just business like backdating stock options. Take a business class or read the history of Enron to see how Apple can do business.

[ethana2]

Heron > Leapord

This whole 'open mac' thing is a waste of time.

That said, I would absolutely love to see the Apple EULA struck down in court.

[shycelticwitch]

Since none of you here are Apple fans, why are you posting here? Don't you have your own WIndblows forums to expel your frustrations over not being able to afford some quality in your life? Do you even HAVE a life? I hope Apple knocks Psystar's peepee off. They will be left with nothing but the big set of kahunas they used to try and sell us the pile of doo doo they claim is as good as a Mac.

nuf said.

[shycelticwitch]

I am getting the impression that certain words typed into this comment box will automatically cancel your posting. Not fair. I hope Psystar loses.