After all the hoo-hah about the fabulously peripatetic Psystar, at least one person says he has taken delivery of one of the machines, a PC chassis running Mac OS X 10.5, aka "Leopard".
Jason Chen at Gizmodo has the video (which doesn't seem to be embeddable). And it is a computer that's not a Mac that does seem to think it's a Mac.
The lucky recipient is a guy (we think) going by the user handle of whiskeyfrown, who noted that he'd got it on Gizmodo yesterday - only to be leapt on (figuratively) by people accusing him of lying. He posted a YouTube video, but that went down (huh), but now the machine has come back again - not that that has stopped people being extremely dubious. Honestly, some internet commentators, eh?
Still, whiskeyfrown seemed happy enough:
To follow up, I used this machine all day today at work without a hiccup. So far everything is working perfectly (something I can't say about my G5 it's replacing) Photoshop, Firefox, VMware Fusion (I know...ironic) as well as the OS itself all performed as expected.
These guys may have made some mistakes, and are obviously treading on very thin ice regarding Apple's EULA, but they ARE shipping plain vanilla PC's that run OS 10.5.2 like a champ.
Say what you will, but the black boxes they are using are not ugly (and who really gives a rats ass if it works).
We'll have to wait and see how long it will take for these to hit some of the bigger outlets (particularly MacWorld and CNet, which both I think plonked down real money for theirs), and what they think. Obviously it would be dicing with brick-ness to use software update on them - but then, plenty of iPhone owners have managed to live without obeying the nagging button of Updatealiciousness.
For now, though, Psystar may just have a real product and a real chance of profit. Unless and until Apple chooses to sue it for breaking its EULA. Then things would get really interesting - we're sure there's a pro bono lawyer out there willing to act for Psystar to see whether one can install Apple's software on any machine (ie end tying). Isn't there?
Update: we shoulda watched the whole video. As John Gruber points out, "Check out the fan noise once the guy turns the thing on. Sounds like a vacuum cleaner."
And meanwhile, Apple has updated its iMac line - the top-level one now goes up to 3.06GHz. And is presumably slightly quieter, though you'd have to put the two side by side to know...
