Another Mac Clone Rises

Apple's lawsuit against Mac clone maker Psystar has not discouraged others. It was recently announced that there is a new company named Open Tech will be producing Mac clones. However, their take is slightly different than that of Psystar. Instead of coming pre-loaded with Max OS, Open Tech will sell computers with Ubuntu Linux, but the system will be totally Mac OS compatible. That means customers can buy the computers and then install Mac OS themselves.

I checked out the Open Tech website and was not impressed. The products are not out yet and the website is obviously in its infancy. The site does not even have its own domain, but is hosted by freewebs.com. You can take a look at it if you want, but I would not buy.

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Apple flexes and stifles competition

You may have heard that Apple recently filed a lawsuit against Psystar.  Psystar is a maker of Mac clones complete with Mac OS X.  They are being sued by Apple for disregarding and modifying the licenses for the Mac OS in computers that they sold.

Whether or not this is true, this new lawsuit is troubling, especially for Apple. 

Apple is famous for being totally proprietary.  This means that they don't let anyone make components or peripherals for their computers.  You can only get replacement parts from Apple. 

Then Psystar pops up offering Mac clones that cost a little over $500.  That is quite a bit less than similar Macs.  These computers have open components which make them much easier to fix.

This situation reminds me of the IBM PC.  When it first released their version of the PC, IBM had features that no other company had.  A group of techs got together and created a product that did the same thing.  The result was called Compaq.

Psystar is doing the same thing that Compaq did.  Apple should cut Psystar some slack and before they know it they will be selling more copies of Mac OS than ever before.