Yes indeed, it’s really happening. On Wednesday I got a confirmation email from Psystar with a valid UPS tracking number. It’ll be delivered by May 5 (feliz Cinco de Mayo!)
Huzzah!
As cool as that is, I’m certainly not the first to get one; several people have already received the machines they ordered, and one guy sent video and photos to Gizmodo. It’s been a bit funny — yet sobering — reading through posts and comments on Gizmodo; the initial posts were pretty skeptical in nature, and only fueled my own skepticism, but now the tone has changed to disdain for those silly enough to actually purchase one of the machines. Many of the comments are tainted with a base hatred of anything Mac, which is to be expected from that crowd.
I knew up front that buying this machine would be a shot in the dark, and bought it with a Plan B that would put the purchased OS and hardware to work in different roles in the event that they couldn’t be effectively used together. Another article at Gizmodo has a good list of reasons to avoid buying a Mac OS machine from Psystar, and although many of their reasons are very valid, I had considered most of them before buying. The one that will keep this machine out of graphics production is the inability to use Software Update, and the inability to do a reinstall. Oh well. On to Plan B.
But then the reported noise level issue may make even Plan B unworkable, so a Plan C may be needed — putting the hardware into a server role of some sort, or swapping out fans or power supply. But then again, it seems that Psystar is reacting fairly rapidly to customer concerns, so it may well be that this won’t be an issue with mine.
We’ll see.