A note on the site Friday said the store "is temporarily down" but
offered no further explanation. The company said it would honor
existing orders from customers who've already paid for their systems.
Psystar blamed a closure earlier in the week on the failure of its credit processing system, and not legal pressure from Apple.
"Midday yesterday [Wednesday] our store was not receiving any
orders. This was due to the fact that our merchant gateway, Powerpay,
dropped the ball on us and refused to process any more transactions
from our company," Psystar said in a note on its Web site.
"We have reverted to PayPal until we can find a high-volume merchant," Psystar said.
A spokesman for Powerpay told News.com that the company dropped Psystar for unspecified violations of its customer agreement.
Also this week, Psystar introduced a new system called OpenPro.
It's a beefed up version of its Open Computer clone. The company claims
it will ship either with a choice of pre-installed operating systems
that includes Ubuntu Linux 8.04, Windows Vista, Windows XP or Apple's
OS X 10.5 'Leopard.'
Ubuntu is free. Vista or XP costs an extra $150, while Leopard costs an additional $155, according to Psystar's Web site.
Psystar claims its Mac clones cost about one-quarter of what
Apple branded systems go for. The company charges that Apple marks up
the cost of the hardware on which its operating systems reside by as
much as 80%.
One version of Psystar's Open Computer features Apple's Leopard
OS X 10.5 operating system ported onto generic PC hardware that
includes anIntel (NSDQ: INTC) Core2Duo processor at 2.66 GHz, a 250 GB hard drive and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card.
The system is priced at $804.99. A similar, Apple-branded computer would cost more than $2,000.
The problem: Apple's end user license agreement expressly forbids
installation or sales of its operating systems on third-party hardware.
Psystar changed the name of its Mac clone from OpenMac to Open
Computer earlier this week--perhaps in response to anticipated legal
pressure from Apple. "The name "Open" has been selected to reflect the
fact that ANY consumer operating system can be installed and run on
it," said Psystar.
