Mac Clone Experiment 4

1. May 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

OK… I was worried… but then I got an email from PsyStar saying ‘SHIPPED’. Amex protects all.

I’ve seen a couple of technical reviews of the Mac Clone. They tend to concentrate on the technical specs and comparative performance between various flavors of Macs (and the Mac Clone) using common benchmark tests. The Mac Clone seems to hold up decently but is not a performance wiz either. Fine by me.

My take on the Mac Clone is:

1. Use OS X

2. Put it on a reasonably prices non-Apple platform.

3. Do Mac stuff. (Replace Safari, please.)

My Mac Clone Experiment is not at all about high performance computing. As I have mantra’d for a couple of years, users need email, browser (for eBay, Amazon and porn, of course), a means to sort pictures, audio and movies and maybe some basic Office applications. This happens to be true for vast percentages of corporate enterprises, too; web apps have taken away the Windows hegemony of client applications. Oh yeah, users want reliability and NOT TO HAVE BECOME SECURITY GURUS to protect their families or business data.

So, my Mac Clone Experiment is about the user experience - period. If the box crawls, then that is a problem, but I don’t expect it. I ordered it with 2GB RAM and I have Macs running quite well from 1GB to 4GB. I know what sort of nominal behavior to expect.

I want to know how it all works from the user, Ma & Pa, student, teacher standpoint. Will it feel like a Mac (but I certainly hope with a functional right-click).

Mac has this incredible feature I just discovered when my office and household upgraded our machines. 30 months is enough already! I laid out all my legit software, tools, backup disks and notebook in preparation for a new machine install. On a PC is could take me 10-16 hours to rebuild a complete mirror of my environment before my new PC was production-ready; that is ready to use the way everything was on my older machine.

So, I power up the new Mac. It says, “plug your old Mac into your new Mac with a firewire cable. Reboot the old Mac, and hold down the ‘T’ button when the tone rings.” Did as instructed and then it told me to jog, have coffee, watch a Star Trek rerun and come back in 74 minutes.

??? Reeeeeeeaaally? I came back and my new Mac was identically configured to my old Mac, rarin’ to go. Being the suspicious sort I poked around in semi-disbelief. EVERYTHING was there. Every setting, configuration, default, driver, utility, patch ad nauseum. The only difference was a new piece of hardware.

Now, I think that is about as time saving as any tool I have ever used. So, when my Mac Clone gets here, after I get Leopard running, cloning my production #1 Mac to the Mac Clone is going to be close to the top of list of tests.

Let me know what sort of Ma & Pa tests you want me to do and I’ll really consider it. Nothing uber geeky, please, since most users only want a reliable machine to use iTunes, You Tube and porn.  (* Hey, enterprise at work users: no porn or NSFW files on your machines.)

Will advise.

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