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$399.99, plus $50 for a FireWire card. Add in the $110 graphics card and the $155 OS installation, and the machine cost $714.99 ($751.47 after shipping).

Pretty reasonable price. I hope that they'll start doing it to laptops.

and it howls like a banshee...

$750! ***** Rip-off!

This is a silly idea as the Mac experience is as much as about hardware as about software. OS X alone won't give you a Mac. But I'm never against choice, I just wouldn't get this machine myself as long as I can afford a real Mac. Plus nothing guarantees I can install future versions of OS X on this clone.

I'm wondering what issues the systems are having, if any. Has Steve Jobs said anything about psystar yet? I'll definitely want to watch that speech.

just now reporting on psystar?
wasnt their 15 minutes of fame like last week?

Why does he have all those icons on his desktop? Drag that ***** down to the dock!

what good does that do? if i dont have a shiny apple on the front of my laptop how will people at starbucks know what i'm using?

Loud, no updates, Time Machine is *****, terrible packing, no support from Apple.

Just what I want to spend my money on!

It's funny that the same people who used to say OS X was absolute *****, are now saying they want a computer from Psystar. Which one is it, guys?

Who the hell would want this? A pro would never touch an unsupported machine. Its too expensive to be a super cheap bargain. Its pretty generic looking. It basically has none of the mac appeal. Plus they don't even build or pack the things right...the power chord getting caught in the fan. Thats bad.

I guess if someone (or even me) were to get this the case and fans would have to be replaced with something higher quality and quieter design.

I don't know... from $800 to a real Mac isn't much. It's almost just worth it to buy the real thing, or invest in your own (quality) hardware and build your own.

So basically, for $750 and the price of a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, you get ...

- A PC with a hacked OS X install
- Broken Time Machine
- Software Updates that can hose the system
- Broken Firewire booting
- No Firewire Target Disk Mode
- No startup drive selection via Option

I'm sorry, but this completely misses the point of the "Mac experience", not only because some basic Mac features simply don't exist, but also because certain other features require hacking and wastage of time to get working.

The whole point of owning a Mac is so that this crap just works out of the box. What you have with a Pystar is not a Mac, but a PC hacked to run OS X. There's a subtle, but huge, difference.

Might be better to just list the parts from the machine and then build it yourself. Sure the hardware is part of the experience, but uh, I'd rather pay a lot less and have the much more fun experience of building it myself. Not for every consumer, but for those willing to figure it out, it beats paying full price.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 and the damn thing wont update and the hardware is cheap and kind of *****. No thanks. The difference in price isn't enough to make me not get the nice well built hardware from apple. I bought a macbook 4 months ago and i've been happy as ***** with it.

$750? Why not just buy a Mac Mini?

lol @ people that think this is a reasonable solution that even begins to compete with Apple.

Waste O time.

Broken Time Machine?!??! There go my dreams of attending the world's largest ice cream social at the 1896 Chicago's World Fair....Damn you Psystar!

"Because we think it ’s informative to see how OS X performs on a computer that isn’t a Mac,"
Do you also find it informative to find out how a Kia handles on a marshy beach?

Nothing but a waste of money and time.

To everyone talking about upgrades: If you upgrade any part of the machine (aside from memory), you will almost inevitably need to reinstall the OS.

I have a Mac Mini, paid $599.00, works with Time machine, super quiet, updates work, super small, fast enough to surf and read email and play the occasional game. Three reasons why I got a Mini.
1) Super Quiet
2) No Viruses
3) OS/X (and I like small things)

Pystar defeats the Mac experience.

Wait...I thought it was illegal to install Mac OS X on a non-Mac? I would be glad to be proved wrong!

How is this different from hacking OSX on to a pc yourself?
My dell laptop boots XP,Vista and OSX.

Why haven't they been sued yet?

Is it ok to like the way mac hardware and software integrates nicely? I agree that some mac products are underpowered on purpose so people will buy the more higher end ones, but for the most part midrange mac products are pretty good values.

Build your own. You can get more functionality. My hackintosh is 100% functional. Updates work, time machine works, gaming works. It's great.
The mini is fine for what it is, but I need something I can upgrade.

"Psystar charges $155 to install the operating system, and I figured we could save a few bucks on our order with a little do-it-yourself know-how. But a few days after ordering, I called Psystar looking for a status update. A live human being answered the phone—somewhat surprising to me, given the stories that had appeared about the company immediately after it announced plans to sell a Mac clone—and put me on hold to look up the order. Moments later, another Psystar employee came on the line and strongly suggested that I pay to have OS X pre-installed. He explained that, unlike the Windows and Linux, installing OS X is a very difficult and complicated process and that the company does not provide installation instructions for OSX. I reluctantly pulled out the credit card, and the system shipped out to us a few days later."

Was considering them until I read this. Sounds like they're holding off on building machines in order to get people to pay them to install OSX. If you order it online, you shouldn't have them trying to upsell you when you check your order status. Very Lame.

Cliffnotes: It sucked hard.

Does it seem strange that everyone is saying "I want to stick a huge beast of a video card in my mac, that's why I want a Pystar." while at the same time saying "lol, no games on mac."? Yeah, you can use that card for 3D work, but if you're doing that, you're not buying a budget PC.

These guys aren't doing anything special. Anyone with enough time and an internet connection can figure out how to get OS X working on off the shelf hardware. On a scale of one to ten, ten being "Mac out-of-the-box user freindliness" and zero being "I built it and researched and hacked until I got OS X to run", I'd say these guys are aiming at a five. I'm not really sure what market they're aiming for.

Aren't Macs just PC's with OS X installed ever since Apple switched to intel chips?

An OS X Capable personal computer? Geez, what a rarity.

The silence coming out of the Apple's legal team is deafening. It can only mean one thing: the attorneys are brewing a hell storm of litigation like the world has never seen. These guys' great great grand nephews will be paying for their misdeeds. I wouldn't be surprised if they subpoenaed the customer lists and also sued all the poor bastards who bought these things.

Looks a hell of a lot like the COMPAQ series casing from 2005-2006 : http://www.woot.com/Images/Sale/Compaq_Sempron_320 ...

The reason they strongly recommend that you have them install OS X on it is because they install a hacked image of OS X. It's not a 100% native and clean OS. While there is a huge price differential between the Apple computers and the Pystar, I have a feeling the headaches of having to run into problems that they can't help you with because of legal issues.

So this is where you end up: a computer that isn't fully supported or likely upgradeable once a new version of 10.5 comes out unless Pystar produces some sort of hack you can download and execute prior or after the update (if the computer will even boot). We all know that Apple will eventually sue and likely win it's case against Pystar when it does. While the OS X license can be purchased separate from the hardware, the end user license specifically states that it can only be used on Apple hardware. The very fact they they are subverting this license by installing a hacked version of it on their own hardware should be enough grounds for suit. A judge that looks favorably on big business will easily side with Apple and their right to the usage of their intellectual property. After all of that, you won't have any support for your Pystar computer because the company will be forced to close their doors after Apple wins 1 Bazillion dollars in damages.

Call me stupid or whatever, but if I wanted to run OS X I would buy a system that guarantees me support, that is meant to work on the hardware it was installed on, and I would buy it from a company that's not going out of business any time soon. I've already been burned by purchasing custom built generic servers and finding out a year later that the company went out of business and filed bankruptcy when I needed them the most. I won't make that mistake again, and I wouldn't make that mistake by purchasing a Pystar computer. Price be damned. I'd rather run Linux than hacked and piecemeal OS X.

Time will tell how this works out. Software updates could be a problem, but there is a project going on in the OSX86 community right now to use Apple's Software Update app, but the updates get downloaded from an OSX86 server that distributes compatible updates. Perhaps this is what Psystar is up to with their "we will have an updating solution soon" line?

I love this! Apple can't pay for a better reason to buy a Mac. Ugly and broken does not make for a winner.

We know about this system already. Did you just hear about this?

Apple fanboys gone wild..