Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Apple Clones reappear this time without Apple's blessing

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When it was discovered that company called psystar was selling computers with Apple's Leopard operating system, a commotion arised and their web server crashed. Using crackes published by OSx86 Psystar becomes the first computer manufacturer to sell OSX based computers without Apple's blessing. The End User License Agreement for the OSX prohibits installation on computers that were not manufacturered by Apple.

This is not the first time that computers not made by Apple have been made to run Apple's operating system software. In 1995 Power Computing was the first to make and sell a clone of Apples' computers. Making the money from the operating system instead of the computer and the operating systems was former CEO Gil Amelio's business plan for Apple. When Steve Jobs came back as the head of Apple, he couldn't stomach the idea of other companies making computers that were cheaper and faster than the computers built by Apple and ended the licensing agreements with the Mac Clone manufacturers.

Back in those years creating Mac clones was expensive because everything in a Mac was different from the CPU to the expansion bus and even the RAM was different that what was used in Windows based PC's. Now Apple's computers use Intel processors, have serial ATA disk drive controllers and have a PCI express exansion bus. The only thing that is different is some of the programming in the firmware of the computer and even that is changing as PC manufacturers are moving from the traditional BIOS to the Extensible Firware Interface that Apple uses.

Back in the days of the original Mac clones Apple didn't have much direction when it came to the design of the computers that they made. Now with bleeding edge computers like iMacs and the MacBook Air, Apple can make it as both a manufacturer of computer and a publisher of the operating systems for their own computers and computers made by other companies.

There has bever been so much demand for an alternative to Windows as there is now due mostly to that stinkbomb called Windows Vista. Apple is best suited to meet that demand. Now Steve Jobs and Apple can step up and meet this demand and grow the Mac OSX market share or continue on their narrow minded way. Choice is yours Steve!!

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