This is a strange product alright. The box seems to be a generic PC with a nice case (they may do better just selling that!), with the InsanelyMac-produced hacks to install Leopard on such PC's. They presumably then sell a shrinkwrapped Leopard box.
There are three messy points: 1) They are actively encouraging you to break the EULA. That may be legally actionable. I don't care if you agree with said EULA or not, it is what it is from a legal standpoint. 2) They are selling the work of the InsanelyMac community (this is running the same ISO you can download from various torrents - nothing more or less). I doubt they'll be all that happy about this either, as it's always been of questionable legality. Drivers are one thing, but they've always had to defeat the hardware checks. 3) Ongoing support? Apple sure as hell won't supply any. Before it went down, they were essentially saying don't apply any OS updates (because they may screw up the hacks), and check the InsanelyMac forums. Again, this is going to drive lots (let's be generous) of uninformed people there that they don't necessarily want to support. See Tivo and DealDatabase for a counter-example.
I don't know if it's legal, but I'm pretty sure this is a bad idea all around.
Well, I think that's always the biggest issue; the support. I don't want to pay for Apple to pay for supporting sub-par systems and engaging in various back-and-forth debates on whose liability it is when X component doesn't work. I'm happy to pay for the testing and validation that went into the equipment I purchased; doesn't make it flawless, but it does mean that I can spend more time computing and less time configuring, troubleshooting, and testing. But then again, my billable hours are in using the computer, not in putting it together to get it to run.
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This is a strange product alright. The box seems to be a generic PC with a nice case (they may do better just selling that!), with the InsanelyMac-produced hacks to install Leopard on such PC's. They presumably then sell a shrinkwrapped Leopard box.
There are three messy points:
1) They are actively encouraging you to break the EULA. That may be legally actionable. I don't care if you agree with said EULA or not, it is what it is from a legal standpoint.
2) They are selling the work of the InsanelyMac community (this is running the same ISO you can download from various torrents - nothing more or less). I doubt they'll be all that happy about this either, as it's always been of questionable legality. Drivers are one thing, but they've always had to defeat the hardware checks.
3) Ongoing support? Apple sure as hell won't supply any. Before it went down, they were essentially saying don't apply any OS updates (because they may screw up the hacks), and check the InsanelyMac forums. Again, this is going to drive lots (let's be generous) of uninformed people there that they don't necessarily want to support. See Tivo and DealDatabase for a counter-example.
I don't know if it's legal, but I'm pretty sure this is a bad idea all around.
Well, I think that's always the biggest issue; the support. I don't want to pay for Apple to pay for supporting sub-par systems and engaging in various back-and-forth debates on whose liability it is when X component doesn't work. I'm happy to pay for the testing and validation that went into the equipment I purchased; doesn't make it flawless, but it does mean that I can spend more time computing and less time configuring, troubleshooting, and testing. But then again, my billable hours are in using the computer, not in putting it together to get it to run.
same case but branded by asus:
ASUS TM-21
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=ASUS+TM-21&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi