First commercial Hackintosh announced by Psystar

As noted by some of our tipsters last night and published today on Ars and MacRumors, a company called Psystar (site currently down, for legal or technical reasons, who can say?) is offering to sell you a $399 "OpenMac" Core 2 Duo minitower that is ready to run Leopard, and for $554 you can get it with a retail copy of Mac OS X preinstalled. With specs blowing well past the base Mini configuration and the expandability of a tower config, such a machine would be appealing to hobbyists and developers... exactly the sort of folks who would be likely to rolltheirown.

The concept of the Hackintosh, while appealing from a technical standpoint and certainly a draw for the budget-minded, always seems to fall down for me when it comes to software updates (you can't), compatibility (it's not), and support (there ain't none). If a central value proposition of Mac OS X and the Macintosh ecosystem is that the OS and the hardware are designed in parallel to work as seamlessly as possible and provide an optimized user experience, then what does a homebrew clone get you but bragging rights and a degree of aggravation? Sure, getting an Asus eee booted into Leopard is pretty cool -- but having owned a legitimate Mac clone back in the Power Computing days, I can vouch for the fact that there's no substitute for the real thing.

Thanks Roberto