Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

[Posted October 23, 2008 by cook]

Information Week reports that Psystar is now selling an Ubuntu-loaded PC. "Mac clone manufacturer Psystar, which has been sued by Apple for copyright violation, isn't putting all its eggs in the Mac OS market. The Miami-based system integrator has introduced a Linux-based personal computer that sells for just $299. Psystar's OpenLite system ships with the Ubuntu Linux desktop preinstalled, running on a 1.8-GHz Intel Celeron chip with integrated graphics support. Upgrading to a dual-core Pentium chip costs an additional $40. "With unparalleled affordability, this computer can bring Windows computing into every home and office," Psystar boasts on its Web site, even though the system runs Linux, not Microsoft Windows."

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 3:40 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (8 responses)

Both Celeron and Pentium (former Core) are 32-bit only. There is no 64-bit CPU upgrade, yet it's possible to order a 64-bit OS even with Celeron. Upgrade prices are outrageous. An extra gigabyte of memory should not cost $40 when 2 gigabytes for $25 are easily found on Pricegrabber. The only graphics card upgrade is NVIDIA! There are very expensive BlueRay upgrades, yet there is no option for using SSD as the hard drive. As for the PCIe 802.11n card, I wonder if it's supported by any distro they supply, especially by CentOS.

I'm afraid the user experience would be dismal.

Computer can Windows

Posted Oct 24, 2008 4:43 UTC (Fri) by sladen (guest, #27402) [Link]

Remember that this machine is shipping with a Linux desktop and not MS Windows Vista. There's no requirement for a Nvidia GPU just to run Minesweeper1GB RAM and a 1.8GHz processor is going to make for a snappy machine.

As for the former observations, I wonder if Psystar would be responsive if emailed with the points, noting at the same time that the blurb for their OpenLite Linux Desktop currently reads "With unparalleled affordability this computer can Windows computing into every home and office", which is at the minimum short of a transitive verb.

...Perhaps the writer intended "remove" or "replace? If so, that "into" needs adjusting!

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 6:25 UTC (Fri) by xorbe (guest, #3165) [Link]

I'm not saying they are good or bad deals, but...

E2180 cpu upgrade is 64-bit
Celeron 430 is 64-bit

And what box manuf doesn't charge a premium for upgrades? At least the nVidia cards are 7-series, because they barely got the 8/9 cards working mostly properly under KDE4 + desktop effects. Again, no idea if this is competitive against any other Linux box maker.

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 6:28 UTC (Fri) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (2 responses)

Are you actually surprised that they'd offer a computer at a low profit margin and extras at a high margin? Computer sellers have been doing this for years (and car dealers before hand, etc).

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 14:41 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not surprised when Dell or HP do it. They also have good deals on some upgrades. They offer more choices and they are well established on the market. But Psystar is just entering the Linux PC market.

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 22:06 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It's a 'trick'.

I expect their rational on the matter is that they can continue to sell hardware to people for the purposes of running OS X on cheap machines, but can avoid Apple's lawsuites due to the fact that they ship a different OS.

I would not be surpised if they just dump a default install of Ubuntu on it with no attempts at quality control, or making sure that all the hardware is supported, or anything like that. Without a review telling me otherwise I would not choose to purchase from these guys.

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 11:23 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

To somewhat echo an earlier commenter

Intel's CPU naming policies tell you nothing any more except what market they expect to sell the processor into. If they think server makers will want a low-power 16-bit CPU with no MMU, they'd call it a "Xeon". If they want to position the exact same hardware as an entry-level consumer product it gets branded "Celeron".

You can only tell what's inside the CPU by either running tools to examine the CPUID values or getting the full model number and looking it up on Intel's technical pages.

Here's the relevant page for "Celeron 430" revealing it to be a low-end 64-bit part.

http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/cele...

And here's the relevant page for the "Pentium Dual-core E2180", revealing that this is a dual-core version with twice as much cache (you'll more than need it for the additional core).

http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/pent...

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 24, 2008 14:37 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

I stand corrected. It was hard to believe that Intel would sell 64-bit processors under old names, especially Celeron. On the positive side, the x86_64 penetration must be higher than I suspected. Perhaps some good deals on "Pentium" and even "Celeron" laptops may actually be for 64-bit systems.

Mac Clone Maker Psystar Offers $299 Linux PC (Information Week)

Posted Oct 25, 2008 16:30 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]

Next thing they sell it as 8088/8064 ;-)