Apple Co-Founder Interested in Psystar's OpenPro

You know Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak right? He's the only Apple employee entitled to badmouth the company's products. Give this piece a quick look, you'll see what I mean. Most recently, folks at ars technica got the chance to chat with Woz. The man shares Apple's concerns with Psystar's Mac clone, the Open Computer/OpenPro (formerly known as the OpenMac), but also says it is high time he got himself a new tower and that the Open Computer sounds like a great choice for that.

Talking about the "cloning days of yore, when Power Computing made rather vanilla-looking PCs that had PPC 600-series processors and ran System 7" ars posts, Woz reckons that Psystar's efforts are similar "except not with Apple's blessing," says the Apple co-founder whose inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s.

A recent Wired piece we've covered reveals that Apple stands little chance to stop Psystar at its tracks (stop them selling the attractive Open Computer which costs around $500 less than Apple's Mac mini and sports more impressive specs). The Cupertino-based corporation can, however, fight back through tech, particularly releasing a Leopard update that "breaks compatibility with the Open Computer/OpenPro," Woz hints:

"I'm sure that when Apple went Intel, they included copyright code in a ROM that is necessary," he said. Psystar's computer needs to emulate the Mac's EFI, probably using a few extra drivers as well. This is what Woz sees as a bump in the road for Psystar and their Mac clone: "You have a right to run Mac Software on any non-Apple computer, but you don't have the right to copy codes that are built into Apple's hardware, so you are stuck," Woz told ars.

The same source notes that Apple doesn't have to ensure compatibility with non-Apple hardware. Even though some would grab a cheaper alternative to its systems in a jiffy and still run Leopard, that doesn't make Apple a winner. Hopefully everyone understands that, although there's a cheaper Mac mini out there (ten times the size though), Apple's OS works best with Apple's hardware. As you can imagine, they want to keep it that way.

"I need another tower and I like the price, so I may get one," says Woz speaking about possibility of him acquiring an Open Computer/OpenPro.