By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
A Miami-based system integrator that's selling an unauthorized Mac clone has closed its online store for the second time this week.
A note on the site Friday said the store "is temporarily down" but offered no further explanation. The company said it would honor existing orders from customers who've already paid for their systems.
Psystar blamed a closure earlier in the week on the failure of its credit processing system, and not legal pressure from Apple.
"Midday yesterday [Wednesday] our store was not receiving any orders. This was due to the fact that our merchant gateway, Powerpay, dropped the ball on us and refused to process any more transactions from our company," Psystar said in a note on its Web site.
"We have reverted to PayPal until we can find a high-volume merchant," Psystar said.
A spokesman for Powerpay told News that the company dropped Psystar for unspecified violations of its customer agreement.
Also this week, Psystar introduced a new system called OpenPro. It's a beefed up version of its Open Computer clone. The company claims it will ship either with a choice of pre-installed operating systems that includes UbuntuLinux 8.04, Windows Vista, Windows XP or Apple's OS X 10.5 'Leopard.'
Ubuntu is free. Vista or XP costs an extra $150, while Leopard costs an additional $155, according to Psystar's Web site.
Psystar claims its Mac clones cost about one-quarter of what Apple branded systems go for. The company charges that Apple marks up the cost of the hardware on which its operating systems reside by as much as 80%.
One version of Psystar's Open Computer features Apple's Leopard OS X 10.5 operating system ported onto generic PC hardware that includes an Intel Core2Duo processor at 2.66 GHz, a 250 GB hard drive and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card.
The system is priced at $804.99. A similar, Apple-branded computer would cost more than $2,000.
The problem: Apple's end user license agreement expressly forbids installation or sales of its operating systems on third-party hardware.
See original article on InformationWeek
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