Like a too-trusting doggy who keeps running, tail wagging, back to its abusive owner, only to get booted in the muzzle once again, hackintosh-monger Psystar has rolled over and asked Apple for another whack.
This time the lawyer bait is the Rebel EFI, a boot loader which allows the installation of OS X Snow Leopard onto pretty much any commodity Intel PC. The Darwin Universal Boot Loader, or DUBL, allows the system to start up from a Snow Leopard install disc and to boot into the Mac OS when you’ve done installing.
All you need to do is download a small file (7.6 MB) and use it to make a bootable CD. You then start the computer from this disk and wait until it tells you to swap in your Snow Leopard DVD. That’s it.
Or, that’s kinda it. The list of caveats, warnings and workarounds that follows the short instructions shows just why Apple will never bother supporting its OS on third-party hardware: There are just too many unknowns in the various machines to consider them all. Take this example, which is the description of the Psystar Labs Approval program.
To alleviate some the incompatibility issues some devices will experience, Psystar has begun their home certification program. Once authenticated, users will be given the opportunity to send in hardware components that are not working correctly and have our engineers build a profile for the device.
Nice. You might have to send in, say, your wireless card and hope Psystar can get it back to you along with a working driver. Not bad enough? How about this?
If when booting OS X your computer hangs at a screen with the Apple logo and a “no smoking” sign, you may have an issue with a BIOS Setting. To rectify this, follow these procedures.
Uh oh! “These procedures” turn out to be a lot of rummaging in the advanced BIOS settings of the machine. But the most confidence-inspiring part of all is this one, which gets its own FAQ entry entitled “‘Installation failed’ message.”
You may receive this message upon the completion of the OS X installation. Please know that this may not necessarily be the case and that it may have correctly been installed.
With all the trouble involved for the end-user, Psystar is surely giving this away just to needle Apple, right? Wrong. The asking price is a hilarious $90, currently reduced to $50 as an introductory offer. But at least there’s a trial version, right? Again, kinda. The free trial will let you install OS X but will only let you run it for a couple hours at a time, and then with the rather ominous-sounding warning, “limited hardware functionality as compared with the full version.” That means you can’t be sure that all the hardware drivers work on your machine without paying up first. Seriously, why not just run Windows?
The final irony is that the Rebel EFI is activated by an “authentication code,” which means that it will doubtless be all over the internet the minute a hacker gets hold of it. And in this case, “hacker” means every single customer.
Product page [Psystar]
Press release [PR Web]
Photo illustration : Charlie Sorrel
