News

Psystar Holds Cyber Monday Sale On Mac Clones

Paul McDougall
Editor At Large, InformationWeek

The upstart reseller is offering a fully configured Leopard system for $554.

Undaunted by a copyright infringement lawsuit, Mac cloner Psystar has joined the ranks of e-retailers like Amazon.com and Overstock by holding a Cyber Monday sale.

The company, which sells low-cost knockoffs of Apple's pricey Macs, is offering free CPU, memory, and hard drive upgrades on a number of its models. It's also slashing prices. As of Monday morning, Psystar.com was pitching a fully configured Mac clone, featuring the OS X "Leopard" operating system pre-installed and a dual-core CPU, for just $554.


More Internet Insights

Webcasts

More >>

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Psystar's Web site notes that the offers are good only on Dec. 1, which in recent years has come to be known as Cyber Monday as individuals returning to work from the Thanksgiving holiday use office computers to shop online.

Apple sued Psystar for copyright violation in July, alleging that Psystar's Mac clones infringe its copyrights. A judge last month rejected Psystar's claim, filed in a countersuit, that the Mac OS represents a discrete computer market unfairly dominated by Steve Jobs' company.

Psystar's countersuit claimed that Apple's control over the market for its own products violates Sherman antitrust rules and other U.S. laws. A Psystar victory could have paved the way for other PC makers, including big vendors like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, to enter the Mac OS market and offer alternatives to Microsoft Windows PCs.

Psystar isn't depending completely on the Mac OS market. The system integrator recently introduced a Linux-based personal computer that sells for just $299.

Psystar's OpenLite system ships with the Ubuntu Linux desktop pre-installed, running on a 1.8-GHz Intel Celeron chip with integrated graphics support.

Upgrading to a dual-core Pentium chip costs an additional $40.

Related Reading


Informationweek Discussions

Start the Discussion


InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links