SuperMAX computers running OS X for less money than a Mac Pro? Is this email a joke?

[Eric L]

Received this from a guy I bought a MacPro from on Ebay. He's gonna get his pants sued off right?

and we wanted to let you know about something very exciting that we've been
working on.

About a year ago, as a long time Mac power user, I got fed up with the poor
OS X hardware offerings and decided to do something about it. I started
researching and investigating the recent Hackintosh craze that seemed to be
becoming more and more prevalent. What I found was that "Hackintoshing" as
it is called, kind of got a bad reputation because there was no real
organization to it and no managing entity. But the concept of it is sound.

So I decided to change all of that. I found the top programmers and OS X
minds across the globe, and I enlisted them in the cause. They are committed
to this not because they can make money but because they believe that OS X
power users deserve better. With a week we will launch our official website,
and there will be two very high profile Mac bloggers that will be reviewing
seed units that we have made. The project is called SuperMAX. Please
understand, we do not install OS X for you. We simply have created the
ultimate workstation, that once you install your operating system, it yields
performance previously unavailable in the market place. The components were
chosen and extensively testing because of the characteristics that they
provide.

If you purchased a Mac Pro from us, we will (in most cases) offer you
75%-85% of your purchase price as a trade up to SuperMAX. Some of your
components will go directly into your SuperMAX.

Performance: We score over 28000 on Geekbench. We score over 21 on Cinebench
11.5. If you use Final Cut Pro, Lightroom, Adobe CS4 or CS5, Maya 2010, or
any other intensive applications, give us a try. We have a 30 day money back
guarantee.

Please understand, this is an expensive machine. However, if you need lots
of power, there is nothing like this in the world. For the price of Apple's
new Mac Pros that just got announced yesterday, we can give you 30-60%
better performance for the same dollars.

For more details, I can be reached at 913-317-8511 or AOL IM: dealexpress2
or Skype: dealexpress2.

Chris Myers
Dealstar

[tom_lowe]

Originally Posted by Eric L

Received this from a guy I bought a MacPro from on Ebay. He's gonna get his pants sued off right?

Someone else did it, they got taken to court and no longer operate, but they installed Mac OS X for you.

If this guy doesn't do that, he's not braking any of Apple's rules. It'd be the same as all the people who make "Hackintoshes". Apple can't sue them all, but potentially they could be blocked by future OS updates.

[dsteinwedel]

It all depends on exactly how they're getting the OS to boot. OS X uses hardware checks to verify that you are running on Apple hardware. I'm not sure exactly where in the computer this occurs.

They may be taking existing Apple hardware and simply updating whatever components they can. If the chip that provides verification is separate from the CPU and cache, there's a good chance they can build a better machine (Apple hasn't updated the Mac Pros in a long time). At that point, they're running modified Apple hardware and that would be more legit than what others have tried. (There is still the possibility of conflicts between the OS/software and the newer chipsets on the market.)

If they're emulating Apple's hardware checks or otherwise routing around them then yes, they will definitely get the pants sued off them.

--Dave

[Suda Badri]

Laws on ownership states that once you buy something you can "Mod" it to your hearts content and sell it on for a lot more than you bought it for, what you cant do is make a copy of the modded whatever and sell it on...

there are 2 ways to boot hackintosh's Darwin and boot-132

Darwin is illegal, boot-132 is completely legal, no hacking required... plus it works exactly like you would expect... Apparently, no one has come across any issues and you wont experience osx in any different way to people who paid the silly asking price for an apple mac (like me)...

its like this, if you buy a legit copy of OSX and then load it using boot-132, you are not breaking any laws as you are not doing any "funny business" to the OSX software. the hardware side of things is YOURS, you have full ownership... and since you are not buying any of their hardware they cant say shit... EULA is just a scare, we have to know our rights...

Think of it in this way, if you buy a text book and mke highlights on it and sell it onto another student with a 500% mark up, you are completely within your legal right to do that, but if you make photocopies of the highlighted text and try to sell multiple copies... be prepared for court...

All SuperMAX has to do is make sure that no 2 computers share the same software and make sure every computer has had a legal copy of OSX installed... No EULA can stop you from doing that and selling the machines... its like how mod shops work... you can even mod the software once its installed but you just have to be honest about it and not call it an apple computer...

Off Topic: What is really crazy is the fact that Apple realeased a update that messes up all the jailbreaked iPods... now jailbreak is an actual hack and is illegal, but because of the means that apple went about to get rid of jailbreakers (ie instead of suing the jailbreak community, they disabled them)... the jailbreaker community (UK) sued apple and won $25mil.... this is an extreme case because its the first time the hackers actually won... if apple has sued them instead of maliciously make the hackers life harder they would still be happy, now they lost 25mil (which they wont care about) but were forced to write an update so jailbreakers could go on hacking!!!

Suda

[soundslikejoe]

"Apple Hardware" doesn't exist anymore. ALL of their parts are outsourced to, or designed by, the typical players; Intel, ATI, etc.

My current machine has Intel mobo and Xeon processor. I have OSX on one hard drive and Windows 7 on another. Their is not a hardware check but there are certain combinations of motherboard/cpu that will boot with OSX.

Google it.