The tech world has seen nearly a year’s worth of legal volleyball between Apple and Mac clone maker Psystar. It’s been a tireless back and forth of he said, she said, involving anti-trust suits, copyright infringement and who knows what else. All that said, there’s yet to be an offical verdict, and while Psystar continues to sell machines, another Mac Clone maker has cropped up in Germany.
According to Ars Technica, the PearC (Apples, pears, geddit?) actually packs some pretty impressive specs. Starting at €499, the company offers a starter PearC with a variety of dual-cores, either a GeForce 7200GS or 8400GS and up to 750 GB HDD. The Advanced model comes with a Core 2 Quad processor, a Blu-ray burner and a GeForce 8400GS, 9800GT, or 9800GTX. Lastly, the Professional model packs a Core i7 processor, 1TB of storage as standard, and up to 12GB of RAM. All come with the option to install Mac OS X.
With Psystar still busy defending itself against Apple (a year of legal costs sort of starts to add up), you’d think other aspiring clone makers would wait to see how things pan out before putting their own wares on the market. Apparently not. TUAW reports that PearC's parent company, Hypermeganet, says there’s no legal way to review the Mac OS X End User License Agreement (EULA). We passed the original article onto a member of our German team and he said the company’s main argument is that since you can’t read the EULA before purchase, it’s not valid.
While the law no doubt only stands in Germany and Apple will almost certainly file suit anyway, we’re still really interested in seeing how this develops.
Check out Ars Technica and TUAW for more or less the same.
