28. June 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

I bought the PsyStar “Mac Clone”. I tried. I really tried because I firmly believe that it would be a good thing for humanity to have OS X on more than 8% of desktops - especially since they are largely always on. The bad guys use the clueless masses to penetrate, obfuscate and cause endless mayhem.

After hours and hours of playing and talking with PsyStar, I have concluded that this product, while potentially very cool, is not ready. Period. Do not buy it. Yet, that is. They need to really upgrade, fix and make the entire experience far better than it is.

In short:

•     I bought the PsyStar without OS X cause I have my own licensed (legal) family packs.
• It arrived a few weeks late.
• The lack of documentation is pretty bad, especially for nube users. You have to know what you’re doing.
• Then it still doesn’t work.
• Unable to recognize or load OS X no matter what.

Their tech support people were pretty useless.

“You should have bought it with OS X installed.”

“It’s really really hard to install and make it work.”

Then why does PsyStar and its sales dept offer it naked? Big mistake.

So, recommendation:

• Do not buy a PsyStar - yet.
• Wait till V2.0 comes out. At least.

You get what you pay for. Nothing.

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6. May 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

My Mac Clone got here. Cool. Remember, I am doing my Mac Clone Experiment as though I was a total n00b. My interest is in how Ma & Pa will deal with this new machine. Comments always welcome, but keep in mind who I am doing this for.
The box. Upon opening, the Mac Clone was not wrapped in plastic. It was merely shoved into peanuts. Not my first choice. Then there was the anti-static bag. Nothing else. No instructions. Fair enough.

Inside the anti-static bag are a power cable, a VGA-DVI video adapter, a couple of drive ribbon cables and Intel and video card manuals and disks.

This reminds me of the days when we bought our machines from local PC shops or built our own. Lots of disks and manuals. I had a minor freak here… but reminded myself this is an Experiment.

My contribution, which is all I should need (theoretically) is a mouse & keyboard, wirelessly connected via USB, a generic 15” LCD monitor and OS X Leopard master disks. (Yes, Mr. Jobs, I am breaking the EULA. But it is a dumb EULA and besides, this is for Educational purposes only.) ☺

My problem for Ma & Pa is now… “What do I do? Where are the instructions? Where’s the keyboard? The mouse? Oh, dear, what do I do now?” And the Mac Clone sits idly by as a doorstop until a neighborhood teen shows up to help.
Technically we call this, “A Bad Thing.”
- No manual
- No “Here are the parts you should have”.
- No quick set up guide
- No slow set up guide.
- No nada.

Since I know what to do, it’s time to wire it up.

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5. May 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

IBM is giving Macs a shot in the enterprise.
Hackers at DefCon: 50% Mac-OS X, 40% Linux. The rest from Redmond.
As a security guy, I threw a huge hissy-fit in April of 2005. I was sick and tired of the hassles with Windows on my machines, my wife’s machines – the whole house of WinTel boxes – some 20 of them.
I marched down to an Apple store, spent gobs of money on a wall full of machines and came home, assuming I would have a couple of all nighters ahead of me. But I was sorely wrong!
It was pure plug’n’play. I dumped the crappy Apple browser Safari for Firefox. Loaded MS Office for Mac and ftp client and I was done.
I neglected to add anti-virus software, a personal firewall, spyware detectors, or any of the litany of boot-reboot installations I had been accustomed to for so many years.
In short: since April 29, 2005, I have run zero security on my Macs – all 14 of them. Is that smart? It was an experiment and I published the results of it in my Mad as Hell Mac series, along with TCO, a Total Cost of Ownership study. (LINKS, etc.)
Perhaps the greatest benefit to me was totally avoiding Vista. But that’s another story.
So, yes, I am a firm convert to Mac for a couple of reasons:
-    My life is easier. A migration from one Mac to a new Mac, with all the bits and pieces is a one button affair. No more “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.”
-    Users need email, a browser, Word and some methods to manage pictures, music and videos. Enterprise users are vastly integrated to web-enabled applications, obviating need for Windows and its concomitant security issues.
-    I like simple. Simple works. Simpler is securer.
-    Users do not need to become security experts. Security problems are simply a non-issue for a reasonably aware and non-technical user. The ‘Don’t’ list is short.

Result: There is no earthly reason for the vast majority of computer users to ever have to use, touch or breathe the same air as a WinTel box.
But Apple is a pain in the gluteus maximus. Arrogant. The Closed System Approach is not my favorite, but when you read the Mad as Hell series, you can appreciate awesome engineering for what it is. But so arrogant at the same time.
The Apple EULA (End User License Agreement) is pretty arrogant, too. “Thou shall not run OS X on any equipment not made by Apple.” So, arguably the most friendly, stable, and interoperable OS in the world is Apple hardware locked. There’s that arrogance again… sort of like the U.S. being the only country in the world that does not use the metric system.
To battle Darth Mac, the community at large (hacker, geek, researcher….) said to hell with the EULA, and to hell with Apple… “we are going to make OS X available to the world” and escape the Apple-hardware hegemony.
The OSX86 Project (http://www.osx86project.org/) took the lead to make OS X Intel-Generic-PC compatible. After all commodity PCs are a lot less money and OS X is not as much of a resource hog as (especially) Vista.
Running OS X on a WalMart PC is not a no-brainer. I played with it for a while, bricked several machines in the process (that’s why I call it an experiment) and gave up 40 hours later. Reports of OSX86 success are sketchy and currently not for the faint of heart and definitely not for Ma & Pa.
That’s why I have begun the Mac Clone Experiment.

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5. May 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

My Mac Clone showed up on the front porch. My wife hollered down to my studio, “you next computer just arrived…” as though I need more she is undoubtedly thinking.

Will document the process as a USER… not as a semi-smart guy.

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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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23. April 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

My PsyStar didn’t arrive yet. It’s been a week. So, scam, eh? I went to their web site. There’s a map and phone numbers. I called.

Got a live human in a few seconds. Impressive. I asked where my Mac Clone is. He looked up my order number; fast. Confirmed everything.

“So, this isn’t a Mac Clone Scam?”

“No scam, sir.”

“When will I get my Mac Clone?”

“Ships on Monday.”

Then he tried to talk me into having them install Leopard (OS X 10.5.x) since I ordered a bare bones Mac Clone. Since I am sort of reviewing this emerging area, I want to know what the experience is… naked box + Leopard. He tried to talk me out of this approach… “Since it does require installation…” but I declined.

Does this mean that Mac Clones need a lot of tweaking to make them work? If so, then it isn’t much of a Mac Clone as far as I am concerned. If it’s a no brainer install, like it should be, these guys at PsyStar will have a huge hit and a huge lawsuit on their hands. And I will own one.

So far… so good… promises… protected by Amex… and really hoping PsyStar has their act together.

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18. April 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

So www.psystar.com may be a hoax. Hmmm… I ordered my Mac Clone sans OS so I would use my legal 5 machine Leopard. There seems to be a lot of stink about the company and the owner and all sorts of hoopla. Whatever.

If and when it gets here, I will let you know. And see if it’s even worth it… or whatever happens to happen.

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17. April 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

On April 29, 2008, I began an experiment because I through a hissy fit at my WinTel boxes. Spent gobs of money at the Apple store cause they gave me 30% off everything I bought before midnight. Filled two SUVs with Macstuff. See the experiment and the resulting total cost of ownership studies and tools on my vanity site.

Result: There is no earthly reason for the vast majority of computer users to ever have to use, touch or breathe the same air as a WinTel box.

Now, upstart www.Psystar.com (I had never heard of them) says they have a Mac Clone.

Cool. I ordered one. I have played the OS-X on x86  game: Goal is to get OSX to run a cheaper commodity box. Some people have succeeded. I failed - after a lame 3 hours. If it’s that hard for me, it ain’t ready for Ma & Pa.

So, knowing I am likely breaking every Apple EULA known to their attorney group, I am going to play with the new Open Computing Platform and see what happens.

Stay tuned. Will advise.

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