Hasta La Gadget!

Mac cloner Psystar claims it has entered a partial settlement with Apple, which will prevent Psystar from selling PCs preinstalled with the Mac operating system. However, Psystar isn’t completely surrendering.

As part of the settlement, the Mac cloner said it will pay Apple an amount of damages that has yet to be specified. In the Monday filing, Psystar argued to exclude Rebel EFI, a $50 piece of software that the company started selling in October, from any potential injunction. Rebel EFI is a program that enables owners of some Intel PCs to install Mac OS X onto their systems.

An excerpt from the court document [pdf] filed Monday by Psystar follows:

Psystar and Apple today entered into a partial settlement that is embodied in a stipulation that will be filed with the Court tomorrow. Psystar has agreed on certain amounts to be awarded as statutory damages on Apple’s copyright claims in exchange for Apple’s agreement not to execute on these awards until all appeals in this matter have been concluded. Moreover, Apple has agreed to voluntarily dismiss all its trademark, trade-dress, and state-law claims. This partial settlement eliminates the need for a trial and reduces the issues before this Court to the scope of any permanent injunction on Apple’s copyright claims.

….

The summary judgment in this case turned on the manner in which Psystar assembled its Open Computers.  It turned on such things as the use of the Psystar imaging station and what this Court found to be the creation of multiple copies and derivative works of Mac OS X along the way….  None of these same facts is involved in Rebel EFI.  Rebel EFI is entirely a software product.  It does not involve the assembly by Psystar of any computers…. Nor does Rebel EFI contain or include Mac OS X.  A Mac OS X DVD does not even accompany sales of Rebel EFI.  Rebel EFI consists solely of Psystar software available for sale and download through Psystar’s website.  In particular, whether sales of Rebel EFI are lawful or not depends on whether Psystar’s end users have a defense under 17 U.S.C. § 117.  This issue has not been litigated in this case at all.  Psystar’s end users do not engage in commercial use of Mac OS X and their use would qualify as use for “internal purposes” even under the standards articulated by Apple in its summary-judgment briefing.  If Psystar’s end users are protected by § 117, then Psystar cannot be violating the DMCA by selling Rebel EFI because Rebel EFI, as used by the end users, does not facilitate infringement.

In short, Psystar wishes to continue providing a DIY solution for owners to make their own Mac clones, thereby shifting the responsibility (i.e., breaking Apple’s End User License Agreement) onto the consumer.

However, it’s unlikely this workaround will pan out for Psytar. In 2008, Wired.com reported on a company called Open Tech, which said it would sell PCs bundled with instruction kits for consumers to install Mac OS X themselves. However, Carole Handler, an intellectual property lawyer with Wildman Harrold, told Wired.com that Open Tech would be subjecting itself to contributory infringement of Apple’s end-user agreement.

“Making the user instead of the company the perpetrator of any violation will not avoid the issue of a new company’s contributory infringement and/or vicarious liability for what it facilitates and enables the user to undertake,” Handler said in an e-mail interview. “This kind of workaround is not a bar to Apple bringing contributory infringement or vicarious liability claims.”

Though slightly different, Psystar’s solution could also be considering aiding the consumer to break Apple’s EULA, which reads, “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.”

Psystar, a company based in Florida, opened its Mac clone business in April 2008. Three months later, Apple filed a lawsuit alleging Psystar was committing copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap license infringement. Judge William Alsup in November ruled that by selling PCs hacked to run Mac OS X, Psystar had violated Apple’s copyrights.

Additional details regarding the settlement will be filed today, according to Psystar.

See Also:

• Mac Cloner Psystar Sold Fewer Than 1000 Hackintoshes
• Psystar ‘Rebel EFI’ Patch Installs Snow Leopard on Any PC
• Mac Cloner Psystar Guilty of Violating Apple’s Copyright
• Judge Dismisses Mac Cloner Psystar’s Bankruptcy

Photo: Psystar

Apple’s new 27-inch iMac is a speed demon, especially the model shipping with the new Core i7 processor. Even better, the latest iMacs ship with the new Magic Mouse, Apple’s first single-button mouse that gets it right thanks to the powers of multitouch.

Wired.com’s Mike Calore is mesmerized with his Core i7-powered iMac. He gave it a rating of 8 out of 10:

Put one of Apple’s new 27-inch Core i7 iMacs on your desk, and you run the risk of alienating yourself from your friends, co-workers and loved ones.

Sure, the sheer speed of the thing is amazing — the new Core i7 processor is outrageously fast — but it’s the massive screen that will turn your brain into a gob of HD-saturated jelly. Seriously. The iMac’s screen is so freaking huge, so bright and so crisp, it will render you dumb with child-like glee. You’ll just want to sit there and watch movies all day and night.

And yours truly was a fan of the Magic Mouse. I think it’s the first Apple mouse that doesn’t suck. (I wasn’t a fan of the Mighty Mouse because of its gunk-collecting trackball.) I gave it a 7 out of 10, knocking off a few points because of the lack of Exposé functionality:

The Magic Mouse ditches the lozenge-shaped body and gunk-collecting trackball of its predecessor (the Mighty Mouse) in favor of a curvy wedge shape with a fully touch-sensitive housing. The new form factor fits more naturally in your hand than previous Apple mice — enough so to erase the painful memories you have of that atrocious hockey-puck mouse from the ’90s.

….

As is often the case, these gains come with loss, too. The Mighty Mouse had a clickable scroll wheel and two squeeze sensors on the side that could each trigger the Exposé and Spaces tools for desktop management. The Magic Mouse doesn’t have any built-in gestures for Exposé, which seems like a wasted opportunity.

Want the full gist? See Mike’s full review of the iMac and my writeup of the Magic Mouse at the Wired Reviews site.

See Also:

• Apple Unleashes New Macs, Multitouch Mouse
• New iMacs Outperform Mac Pros in Benchmark Tests

Photo: Mike Calore/Wired.com

Apple’s Mac Pros are pricey desktops designed for prosumer applications, so it’s not often you see them in a person’s home. But the speedy new iMac could render Mac Pros irrelevant even in offices if Apple doesn’t upgrade its high-end desktop soon.

Benchmark testing by Macworld found that the top-of-the-line iMac, which features a 2.8-GHz Core i7 processor (one of the newest Intel chips using the Nehalem microarchitecture) and a 27-inch LCD display, is faster than the two Mac Pros available — a quad-core 2.66-GHz model and an eight-core 2.26-GHz version.

Of course, the iMac and Mac Pro are not directly comparable beasts. With the iMac you get a screen, of course, and this computer-crammed-into-a-display doesn’t have as much wiggle room for adding upgrades. With the Mac Pro you don’t get a screen, but you have a sizable case with more flexibility in terms of adding hard drives, RAM and so on.

Still, there’s probably a good number of prosumers that will choose the iMac now thanks to its performance advantage, huge display and price tag. The Core i7 iMac costs $2,500; the quad-core 2.66GHz Mac Pro costs $2,500, and the eight-core 2.26GHz version costs $3,300.

With all that said, that probably means Apple will be rolling out an upgrade for the Mac Pro fairly soon — perhaps early 2010, since Apple has said this year’s holiday lineup is set.

See Also:

• Apple Unleashes New Macs, Multitouch Mouse
• The 27-Inch iMac Is the New Apple TV
• Customers Complain New iMacs Plagued With Performance Problems …

Image courtesy of Apple

Imagine a computer that was so simple even a complete novice could use it out of the box. A computer with a low-powered, low performance and low-priced CPU, the Sempron LE-1250 (or maybe even an Intel Atom). Imagine that it comes in a small box with a tiny (by today’s standards) 19-inch monitor and cheap dime-store keyboard.

What would you do if you had a warehouse full of these machines, all less capable than the cheapest netbook? If it was me, I’d hire a trusted public figure and try to sell the lot to the only demographic that would buy them — old people who have never used a computer before. Better, I’d charge $735 or $890. After all, they all trust the lovely British TV presenter Valerie Singleton, right? Well, guess what? Somebody beat me to it.

The two simplicITy Suite computers are cheap-o boxes with the above mentioned processors, and either wired or wireless keyboard or mouse depending on whether you opt for the 100 or the 200 model. Available in the UK, both run Linux Mint and Eldy, a simple desktop environment which offers the bare basics of email, web browsing and chat. Eldy (and Linux, of course) are both free. In fact, visit the Eldy site (tagline: “Easy computer for our seniors”) and you’ll learn that it can be installed on any PC.

Now, we know that some oldsters can be scared of computers, usually because they think they might “break something”. And we’re all for anything that gets more people on the web (and hopefully reading Gadget Lab). But taking a bunch of extremely low-spec commodity PC boxes, loading them up with free software and hawking them to pensioners seems rather cynical given the high price tag.

The features of the software are nice enough (as they would be if Eldy were loaded onto that old PC you have in the basement). Old folk can browse the web, check weather and Skype the kids, but we can’t help thinking it’s all a little patronizing. Aiming a computer OS at seniors, especially when put onto overpriced hardware, smacks at best of do-goodism and at worse of cashing in on the uninformed. What is wrong with a cheap old PC running Ubuntu? Stick the relevant icons on the desktop, make ‘em big and off you go. It’s free, a helluva lot prettier than the Windows 95-alike Eldy, and when grandma is no longer scared of the web-browser, there’s whole lot more under the hood.

On the other hand, ex-Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton is looking amazing at 72 years old. Maybe I will buy one.

Simplicity copmuters [Simplicity via BBC]
Eldy product page [Eldy]

Kindle fans now have one more place they can read their e-books: a PC. Kindle for PC joins the equally well-named Kindle for iPhone and, er, Kindle for Kindle in the list of ways to read Amazon’s digital-rights-managed content. A Mac version is “coming soon”.

The application does pretty much what the iPhone version does: Your place is synced with other devices by Whispersync, and there is support for your bookmarks and annotations. You can browse and buy from the Kindle Store, but you can’t access blogs, newspapers or magazines. This isn’t a problem, we guess, as you’re sitting at a computer with a web browser anyway.

But the thing that intrigues us is the screenshot above (along with more on the Amazon site) that shows a book with color illustrations. This may mean a color Kindle is on its way, or that Amazon is simply future-proofing its Kindle books. Either way, since when did Kindle books get color pictures? It would seem rather bandwidth-unfriendly to a company that restricts international downloads to save on the wireless bills.

On the other hand, you can now buy and read Kindle books without buying a Kindle. Amazon must be expecting its brand name to shift a lot of e-books direct to computers. Imagine, then, how it would answer the question “Why are the pictures on my $1000 computer in black and white?”

Product page [Amazon]

See Also:

• Kindle for PC Could Trigger E-Book Piracy