We've always been intrigued by the
EFI-X dongle that fools OS X into running on stock Intel machines, Software Update and all, and now it looks like
the company a company called EFi-X USA is taking things one step further -- it's planning on shipping pre-built machines capable of running Apple's OS. The EFi-X Millennium 4 will sport an overclocked 3.8GHz Core 2 Quad, 4GB of RAM, and a GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card in an Antec P180 case, all for $1,899 plus the $199 EFi-X dongle. The idea is to avoid any Psystar-style legal troubles by leaving the purchase and installation of OS X up to the end user, but apparently no one at EFi-X USA has talked to a lawyer or even read our
previous posts on the matter, since Apple's lawsuit against Psystar turns as much on
contributory and induced copyright infringement as it does on Psystar's direct violation of Apple's OS X EULA. In other words, it's illegal to sell a product expressly designed to allow customers to infringe copyrights -- a principle Napster and Grokster made famous, you'll recall. Plus we're pretty certain there's a DMCA argument in there since the EFi-X dongle circumvents Apple's protections on OS X -- the validity of which Psystar is actually testing in its
revised countersuit. We'll see how it goes -- we're seriously worried that these companies are doing far more harm to the OSx86 scene than good.
P.S.- Oh, and honestly, Apple, if you want this entire headache to go away, all you have to do is produce a reasonably-priced, configurable midrange tower. Think about it.
Update: We've just been pinged by the original EFi-X team, who tell us that EFi-X USA has nothing to do with them, that they have no plans to sell actual machines, and that they strongly disapprove of EFi-X USA. Shades of
Psystar's use of netkas's work on OSx86 without permission, we'd say -- shady shady.
[Thanks, Mark]
posted December 12th 2008 11:34AM
What, you don't think that Mac Pros have the drivers require to handle different video cards?
Do you even know what a mid-tower is? Let me break it down for you: It's a MAC PRO, but CHEAP
This whole EFI-X business would be better if they had any customer support worth a damn. If you go on their support forum and ask questions about upcoming firmware release dates, or dare to complain that something is broken in the latest version, they will just remove your posts. If you complain about the posts being removed, they just ban you from the forum. They certainly aren't very skilled at customer service. Half the time you can;t eve understand what they are talking about, since they speak English worse than a Babblefish translation.
The contributory infringement problem comes up because there is no other use of the usb dongle (I hate that word, BTW). Devices that also have non-infringing uses are fine. Technically, however, there is no copyright infringement under these circumstances so long as the buyer has a bona fide Mac OS install disk. Violation of the end user license agreement is a contract matter and can be a serious one at that. But contract law is quite different from copyright law, IMHO.
For as long as apple will continue thinking prices for the products out of their asses. There will always someone trying to undercut their profits.
Someone will always want to crack the monolith. And apple is an excellent company to do that with, because it's a happy world corporation that is run by 3 people. If we could have a vision any narrower we'd call it utopian mini-communism.
For once i agree with the commentator, Apple does need to produce a mid range tower that is modifiable or upgradable.
Something a casual gamer can hold on to for a few years...
And to play devils advocate, Apple allows you to run "Windows" on their machines.... So........
Judging from past lawsuits against Microsoft (that M$ lost), Apple is guilty of one or more of the following:
Monopoly
Anti-competitive practices
False Advertising
Apple runs ads that lead the consumer to believe that a Mac is not a PC but some other independent product that can accomplish similar things. If this is true, then as the sole provider of hardware and OS, Apple is indeed a monopoly. If it is not true, then Apple is responsible for advertising that is false in its nature and is designed for the explicit purposes of deceiving the consumer. Either of these scenarios makes Jobs an evil mastermind that has managed to develop a cult-like following.
Oh and one more thing I noticed (both quotes from wikipedia)
"Safari is a proprietary Internet web browser developed by Apple Inc. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003[1] on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3, commonly known as "OS X Panther." Apple has also made Safari the native browser for the iPhone and iPod Touch." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)
"The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Microsoft Windows operating system. Bundling them together is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of Internet Explorer."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
Apple has never claimed they are not a pc. PC is a term that has come to equal "Windows based personal computer" so that sematics. But Apple recognizes that they are in the same market and the world recognizes they are in the same market. one of the arguments the courts made for it being the same market is that Apple has to fight Microsoft for market share as evidenced by the ads from Apple comparing their product to Windows based PCs and Microsofts ads in rebuttal.
thus Macintosh based computers are not a separate market and there is no monopoly by Apple.
Monopoly by the by has nothing to do with hardware support and options although you tried to claim in a previous post that it does.
on the count of false advertising. yes that came up with the iphone. but in fact in an ideal situation the phone is twice as fast as the previous model and half the price. the only false is that they didn't finish with "performance is based on local cellular service and not all subscribers will have ideal speeds in their areas. also price is dependent on conditions set by the cell phone service company and not all buyers will receive all discounts available" like the drug ads are forced by law to do.
Lastly. the whole Safari thing. it is totally legal for Apple to put Safari on their machines. it is NOT the same situation as the Microsoft case. In THAT case, Microsoft tried to ban sellers such as Dell from putting anything but Internet Explorer on their machines. IE, Dell etc wanted to put Internet Explorer AND Netscape etc on machines pre-installed to give buyers ease of choosing what they wanted to use. Microsoft tried to tell them they couldn't. The courts ruled that the OS and the web browser were two totally different programs and Microsoft was abusing their power in restricting the one as a condition to use the other.
Apple is not required to put all the options on their machines. Only putting Safari is NOT an abuse of power. If they put a clause in their EULA that said you can't use anything but the mail program, web browser etc that they include and/or they wrote the software in such a way that no other program would work, then you might have something.
I like how people complain about price point. A base Mac Pro is $2300, no? This overclocked 3.8 mentioned is $1900 plus a $200 dongle. Doesn't seem like a lot of money is being saved.
I realize I ain't comparing to like items. I am merely pointing it out.
I love my quad 2.8ghz. I could use it for many years without upgrading. If I decide to sell it in 3 years, I will probably get atleast a grand for it. How many Win boxes have that kind of return investment?
Btw, I am not here to argue. I realize each platform has its strenghs.
Basroil, how can you say "Dells have better business support" than Apple? How do they lay claim to this? How about Apple's customer support not being scripted and being in North America? Dell's support has been moved to India unless you pay for their gold support... which is more than Apple Care on comparable machines. Apple's phone support was just rated the highest ever by any computer company for the nth time in a row. They just beat their own record the last time around. Consumer reports, as well as most independent measuring structures have rated them better than their pc counterparts repeatedly in phone support and overall customer support.
Dell's have better support? ! ? Yeah, maybe 12 years ago you could have argued the point.
Your "P.S." hits the nail on the head...succinctly!
Good job...
JR
Depending of what you want, the difference can be high. I own a laptop and what i wanted was a 19' screen. I has a Core Duo. Nvidia graphic, bluetooth and everything for $800. And for Apple? The first MacBook with a 19' is a MacBook Pro and cost $2,799. Yes there is a considerable power difference between both but what I just want is a 19' screen and Mac OS X for the lowest price..... $2000 is a big difference here.
There is no 19" Mac laptop. You're comparing your 19" craptop to a figment of your imagination.
I say craptop cause no respectable 19" laptop with dedicated graphics can cost $800 and be reliable for many years.
in my opinion i know why apple do this things, because if they sell licenses of osx no one will not buy their hardware, and if they turn to a software company who sell os, they could not compete with software companies. their hardware could not compete with hardware manufacturer(dell,hp,asus,sony,etc) and their os could not compete with microsoft,red hat,novell suse, ubuntu,etc.
but in this position someone(like my mother) thought that apple is something so fuckin special.cause they have a special os for their special hardware(no more, now mac is a pc)
osx is just a unix like os,like all other unix based os's,even the 'taste' of osx is the same.
From: http://www.efixusa.com
**NOTE: Millennium project is definitely abandoned, & EFIX USA LLC fights the clones and the clonemakers**.
That means they will not be building any clones, probably, since they are a re saler EFIX told them not to or loose their resale license.
.
I'm so fed up with hearing the "OSX is UNIX and therefore is open source and belongs to us blah blah blah."
OSX is underpinned in Darwin - which is open source, but the similarity stops there. Apple invests good time and money to build a GUI and develop their APIs. Saying that they have no right to protect their investment is the same as saying that authors don't actually own their written works because someone else made the paper it was printed on.
Shouldn't Apple be actually happy for that? That they'll be able to sell OS X without selling their overpriced HW, so they potentially get a higher OS market share?
This stuff is a hobbyist-hacker toy, not something that one would wager their livelihood on. However, I have a decidedly enterprise view - one that, although lives with a plurality of Windows boxes, is not by choice, but by vendor (Microsoft) design.
I am in a somewhat unique position to comment on this, having been part of the development team for the original IBM PC, but also the co-founder of the world’s first Mac user group. I've run IT shops with as many as 262,000 desktop computers - about 10% of them Mac OS X machines. Tracking the total cost of ownership, which includes acquisition cost, support manhours, help desk, application installation, operating systems upgrades, and back end integration into servers, databases, security, etc. Macs cost me 1/10th to 1/25th the operational cost of a PC.
Caveat: The more the infrastructure (servers and back office applications) are proprietary, non-standards compliant Microsoft products, the more if costs to get the OS X machines integrated into the environment.
In addition, the Mac’s minimum hardware diversity is a key factor in platform stability (less drivers to support), and the real reason to be concerned about OS X running on unsupported platforms in anything but a hobbyist environment.
This cost insight is the significant irony - the argument that the proprietary Macs are more costly does not hold up under scrutiny. Ignoring that a similarly equipped Dell - the better built corporate machines, not the consumer junk - is more expensive than the Mac equivalent in all categories, acquisition cost of computing hardware is inconsequential in the overall cost of a computer in an enterprise. This acquisition cost is so insignificant compared to the costs associated with the proprietary nature of Microsoft generated data and applications. This Microsoft data (e.g Office file formats), protocol (e.g. Exchange's bastardized IMAP protocol for calendaring), standards breaking IE, ActiveX, and applications interdependencies (e.g. Application servers, email servers, collaboration servers, active directory dependencies) locks you into the a suite of Microsoft only products, and places significant financial barriers to entry for any other player.
Companies that have adopted proprietary, and therefore, restrictive, Microsoft based platforms, applications, protocols, and data format, have pigionholed their companies into a situation with no clear financial migration strategy. Pinning one's hopes to a single vendor is an exercise fraught in peril, placing you at the whim of the vendor (Vista is a recent case-in-point). And with the costs of a Windows environment 4-10x more than a Mac environment, this is no small cross to bear.
The real key is using data formats that are application portable, application functions that have multiple alternative vendor solutions, and an environment that does not lock you into the agenda of a single vendor, all the while, creating a low cost of ownership, and minimal barriers to user acceptance. OS X provides this, as almost every effort is made in OS X to support interoperability between applications and transparent data transfer/translation. The only things that ever seem to create problems, is attempting to integrate with the proprietary (and prevalent) world of Windows back end infrastructure.
Yes, fewer applications exist on OS X (last published number of native applications was more than 25,000), but virtually every functional capability of alternative platforms, including Windows, exists on OS X. Due to consistency in human interface guidelines, and a rabid user community that demands high quality, Mac applications are easier to train users on, and studies show Mac users regularly run a broader range of applications and functionality - resulting in the computer as a tool that garners more productivity across a greater number of user skills.
I have yet to find a PC user, that, when forced to use a Mac exclusively for 30 days, has ever wanted to return to a PC - the exception being a dependency on some proprietary data that cannot be manipulated in a OS X application. "Course I only have data on a quarter of a million machines to rely on, so my insights may not be as dependable as Joe Hacker-on-a-PC.
Windows does have one winning statistic - the platform just went over 1,000,000 known virus application, while OS X has zero. Oh, well, you can't win them all. You have no idea what costs that creates in a corporate environments. The financial bailout pales in comparison.
To all the morons that can't get the difference between Apple and Microsoft through their thick skulls:
"I want to build my own DVR box and hack it to run TiVo software." Sorry, you can't do that. Go buy a friggin' TiVo.
"I want to build my own game console and hack it to run PS3 software." Sorry, you can't do that. Go buy a friggin' PS3.
"I want to build my own PC and hack it to run OS X." Sorry, you can't do that. Go buy a friggin' Apple.
"I want to build my own PC and load Windows." Uhhh, okay.
Does anyone see why, or is everyone else idiots? MICROSOFT DOESN'T MAKE PCs!!! MICROSOFT IS A SOFTWARE COMPANY!!! TiVo, Sony, and Apple all have the right to protect against unauthorized use of their software, which was designed exclusively to work in conjuction with their bread and butter, their HARDWARE. Use on anything other than their own hardware hurts their bottom line, which gives them every right to pursue companies which enable users to circumvent their EULA.
@Lee.
Apple is NOT a monopoly. It is one choice, just like Linux etc in the Personal
Computer Market. For Apple to be a monopoly there would have to be a Macintosh Computer Market. But there is not. This is exactly what Psystar tried to claim to get out of the laws they totally broke and the courts dinged them on it. Perhaps next time you will actually learn what a monopoly is before you make such claims.
@all those taking about unix, linux etc. yes the OS is based in part on open source and if one is 'copying' those parts there is nothing Apple can do. but not all of it is open source and Psystar et al copied those protected parts
@all those complaining about the hardware tying. the courts have already ruled that Apple has every right to restrict what hardware can be used, just as Microsoft does (but chooses not to). so it is up to you to decide what is more important -- the hardware or the software. Just like all those folks that are complaining about ATT being the only legal carrier of the iphone, Sprint the Instinct, T-Mobile the sidekick etc. what is more important. the carrier or the device.
@those complaining about the choices in hardware that apple gives. personally I would rather that they work on making what they have created better and more cost effective than start giving into every request that the elite 5% of buyers want. spreading their focus to try to make every tom, dick and harry hacker happy risks the same kind of chaos that exists in the PC side of the market.
okay I have been reading this thread and the others about the Psystar thing and I keep seeing all these comments about price and arrangements.
so all you PC know it alls. prove your point. here's what I want as minimums for a desktop computer. give me your best price on this set up.
1. all in one construction (I don't have the space to mess with towers, cables etc)
2. 24" inch screen with a max res of no less than 1020
3. full size keyboard and a mouse
4. built in webcam with mike and speakers
5. 3ghz dual core intel processor
6. 6mb l2 cache
7. geforce 8800 or better graphics card with at least 512mb of dedicated video memory
8. support for a dvi external monitor capable of a max res of no less than 1020, usage in both mirror or extended mode
9. 1 TB 7200 RPM ATA internal hard drive
10. 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 Ram
11. at least 3 USB 2.0 ports, at least one firewire 400 and one firewire 800 port on the machine to support bus powered external devices, at least one ethernet port
12. bluetooth 2.0 support
13. 802.11n built in
14. DVD burning drive with support for double layer disks
15. at least 3 years of full parts and labor coverage for any defective components, walk in technical support available in my area (Los Angeles), unlimited free telephone support for same period.
amaze me