Some more Psystar news for y’all. You’ll recall that the renegade company was more or less shut down last week, slapped with an injunction and expected to pay Apple an awful lot of money. Put all of that aside for a minute, for there’s new news: Apple and Psystar have struck a deal! The deal, which ends a 17-month-long legal battle, means Psystar will stop selling computers pre-loaded with Mac OS X. This ends our long, national nightmare.

So here’s what happens: Psystar has to pay Apple a boatload of money; Psystar will stop selling PCs pre-loaded with Mac OS X; and Psystar may be allowed to keep selling Rebel EFI, which lets users instal Mac OS X on their generic PC. That’s pretty much it.

Or, in a single sentence, Psystar won’t be allowed to sell PCs with Mac OS X pre-loaded, but may be allowed to sell the $50 Rebel EFI, software that lets people instal Mac OS X on regular PCs.

Or, rather than paying for Rebel EFI, you can OSx86 your PC, which I may well do when I get around to building my PC in the coming weeks. I’m either running Linux or Mac on the PC. I’ll be damned if I have to run Windows 24/7!

I suppose that these projections, which we may safely call optimistic, are based on geometric growth (unwarranted) from one year’s figures (essentially invent) and failed to take into account the patent illegality of their entire enterprise. Needless to say, these numbers were not met. Psystar sold a fraction of a fraction of what it promised investors, so even if it were to escape total destruction by Apple’s hands, it would simply be dismembered by its mysterious creditors.

I would have welcomed a Psystar laptop, the planned hardware which was to make up the bulk of their fantasy sales, since our own Psystar desktop worked perfectly well. For all I know, Biggs is still using it. I’m writing this on my MacBook Pro, but I know that I as well as many people I know would welcome a cheap, yet non-hackintosh, OS X laptop.

Oh well. This story held our interest because, deep within, we felt it betokened the inevitable confrontation between Apple lovers and the sternly limited Jobsian world they’ve come to live in. You can be sure that this isn’t the last we’ll hear from clone-makers, which seem, like domestic weeds, to continue to sprout in the areas you thought were clear and cultivated. In fact, the wild but unpredictable growth of dandelions like Psystar, PearC, and Power Computing (remember them?) will continue because, let’s be honest, if you could pay less for your Mac, you would. That’s called a market — and damn the EULAs.

Apple has been fighting for a permanent injunction against Psystar, preventing the company from selling Hackintoshen and their Rebel EFI software. The company has been accused of “trafficking in circumvention devices.”

AppleInisder reports that Pystar has less than $50,000 in assets and that Apple noted “Even if Psystar could pay damages, the harm to Apple’s brand, reputation and goodwill is unquantifiable.”

Oh well. You can always do this.

The fun part is that both sides can use it as ammunition: “We sold more copies in a month than you’ve sold in ten years!” or “A month later and only 5% have upgraded? Either Windows 7 sucks or you’re all stupid, or both.” Good points all around, guys.

The total share of the net commanded by Windows 7 (and by OS X, as they’re currently tied) is around 5%. Windows in its various forms makes up 95% of web traffic, a statistic I found surprising. Windows’ total proportion has gone up a touch since the 7 launch, but that’ll likely revert soon as redundant installs and such are cannibalized.

I’m really more interested in whether any of these ostensibly dangerous materials actually do have an effect on your computer’s hardware. In my experience, the most lethal thing in the house is just the dust and fluff that gets sucked into your fan intakes. That or coffee.

As usual, the above figure applies.

[via TUAW and Macworld]

The Little App Factory seems to have a big problem on their hands. The company received a letter from Baker & McKenzie, representing Apple, asking that The Little App Factory change the name of one of their most successful applications. Why? It has the word iPod in it.

iRip (formally known as iPodRip) was originally written in 2003 at the MacHack developer conference in order to fulfill an obvious problem with the iPod. Basically, iRip lets your copy and transfer your songs from iPod and iPhone to your computer. The app itself has been downloaded more than five million times, and has helped users transfer more then one billion songs to their computer.

The Little App Factory CEO John Devor emailed Steve Jobs regarding the issue. Amazingly, Jobs replied.

The original email:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

My name is John Devor and I’m the co-owner of a small Mac shareware company named The Little App Factory and a long-term Apple customer and shareholder. I doubt you’re aware but we recently received a letter from a law firm working on Apple’s behalf instructing us that we had violated several of Apple’s trademarks in our application iPodRip and asking us to cease using the name and Apple trademarks in our icons.

We have been distributing iPodRip since 2003 with the aim of providing a method to recover music, movies and photos from iPods and iPhones in the event of a serious hardware failure on their Mac which leads to data loss. Our goal has been to provide the highest quality product coupled with the highest quality service in a bid to resolve some of the angst that is generated by such an ordeal; service befitting of an Apple product. In this department we think we have succeeded as we have approximately 6 million customers, many Apple employees, music artists and other notable people in society. In fact I’d argue that our customer service is the best of all competing applications in our niche as many of them are scams and frauds that leave Apple customers with a terrible taste in their collective mouths. We fear very much that tens of thousands of Apple customers looking to recover their own music and having heard of our product via word-of-mouth or otherwise, will instead find a product produced by one of our competitors, and will wind up the victim of a scam (one closely-named competitor charges a hidden monthly fee, for instance).

It is quite obvious that we mean Apple no harm with the use of the name iPodRip, or of the inclusion of trademarked items in our icons, and in fact I believe that we have been providing an excellent secondary service to Apple customers that has potentially caused you many repeat clients. In fact, we are quite aware that Apple support and store staff have recommended our software on numerous occasions as far back as 2004 so we have felt that we were doing something right!

With this in mind, we are in desperate need of some assistance and we beseech you to help us to protect our product and our shareware company, both of which we have put thousands upon thousands of hours of work into. Our company goal is to create Mac software of the highest quality with the best user experience possible. I myself dropped out of school recently to pursue a path in the Mac software industry, and you yourself have been a consistent inspiration for me.

If there is anything at all you can do with regards to this matter, we would be most grateful.

Best,

John Devor

And Steve’s reply?

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

So, not wanting more legal problems then already needed with Apple, The Little App Factory changed iPodRip to iRip, and also have been forced to remove the iPod icon in Evom, an app that lets you convert and transfer movies from your computer and the web.

Earlier this year, The Little App Factory acquired RipIt, a popular Mac app that lets you archive DVD’s directly to your Mac.

DigiTimes,

The sources also indicated that in addition to Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry), Quanta Computer and Pegatron Technology are expected to be manufacturing partners for Apple’s two tablet PC models – one of which will have a 10.6-inch TFT LCD panel while the other will have a 9.7-inch OLED panel. However, the sources did not explain how production for the two models would be split between the three makers.

Even if this rumor is mostly wrong and the Apple Slate comes with standard LCD panels, the 2H2010 launch window seems about right. Consumer electronic products as a whole aren’t exactly moving off shelves these days. Retailers are expecting the worst this holiday seasons as unemployment is the highest it’s been in the US since 1983.

But next year, hopefully it won’t be as bad. Also, more consumers will be familiar and comfortable with the idea of a dedicated tablet PC as ebook readers become more common. If there is one thing Apple knows, it’s timing.

Thieves in Willebroek, Antwerp cut a hole in the roof of an electronics warehouse and stole 3,000 to 4,000 iPhones, one of the greatest heists of its kind in history. The phones were headed to Belgian Mobistar and are estimated to be worth $3 million.

The news article noted that the thieves made a hole directly over the iPhones which suggests they knew exactly where the phones were being kept.

The phones can be feasibly tracked and can only be activated through jailbreaking, which could put a damper on their online sales. Also, this comment was funny:

Haha, geen medelijden mee. Mobistar is zelf een dief als het op abonementen aankomt.

Which roughly translates to “Don’t pity them. Mobistar is the thief when it comes to subscriptions.”

via Fortune

The Lint Boys only got three hot photos of the device because the guys at the Apple store were scared of getting placed into the special Education Room in the basement of every Apple store.

It already has, in fact. But Apple has come kicking and screaming the whole way. The iPhone, you understand, was not meant to be a gaming device, and in Cupertino, Apple’s intentions are paramount. Apple could never accidentally create a platform for gaming; if it wasn’t meant for gaming (or enterprise, or medical use, or reading e-books, etc.) from the beginning, Apple doesn’t want it happening at all. Because if Apple didn’t intend it, it’s outside of the bounds they set into the platform (regardless of how well it works, much like tethering) — it breaks the mold and, ironically, that’s the last thing Apple wants.

It’s no secret that the Apple ecosystem is a gilded cage. It’s a nice cage, and large, and yes indeed that gilding is very attractive by Jove, but all the doors are shut until Apple opens them. If you think otherwise, you’re probably already scrawling some crude flame in the comment section below. Thank you for your insight. Really, though: Macs are a carefully-tended walled garden of semi-delights (to mix several metaphors), and that’s part of why they’re so good at what they do. Attempts at expanding the garden have been made in fits by Apple, with varying success. Serious music production has never really caught on, nor scientific or medical applications, and any real expansions (personal media, mobile, and video primarily) have been engineered by Apple and not third parties. Why should it be any different for gaming? If Apple doesn’t do it, no one will. And Apple’s not going to do it.

But this is all getting rather vague. There are more substantial objections to an Apple expansion into gaming than my half-baked theories on their corporate philosophy. I’ll just enumerate them here in list form. I’m using the iPhone as the basis for these, but the points apply to the tablet without serious modification.

Hardware
The iPhone isn’t a gaming machine. It’s a smartphone. This produces limitations which are for some invigorating, and for some troublesome. For instance, you’ll never see a decent platformer on the iPhone. FPSes are awkward. RPGs take up too much space. You’re essentially limited to casual games and things like tilt-to-control racers. There are some notable exceptions; John Carmack loves the platform, for instance, and will probably be making some interesting stuff. The iPhone may be suitable for some games, but it wasn’t built for them, and that makes a difference for Apple.

Battery
Part of the hardware objection, but worth noting on its own, is the fact that battery life would be off-the-charts bad. How long can you really play a high-quality title on the iPhone? An hour maybe, before you’re down to 25% battery? Remember this is also your lifeline to email, the web, and so on. Unlike a DS, you can’t afford to let it run down. A portable game system needs to be as efficient as it can, and the iPhone is already an energy hog. No one wants to be tethered to an outlet to play their favorite handheld. And the thing already explodes when you use it too hard.

Developers
A few developers are putting out real iPhone games, but where is your Valve, your CryTek, your Rockstar? These are the people who make AAA titles that sell millions and make billions. Ubisoft may outsource some company to make a little Assassin’s Creed 2 clone to cash in a bit on the mobile contingent, but it’ll just be a way to sell the real game. They’re not going to spend $50m to develop a truly amazing game for the iPhone. No one will. Hardly anyone does as it is for existing handhelds (Dragon Quest IX notwithstanding). Apple could align itself with developers, but my feeling is they wouldn’t mix well. Apple is pretty much oil to their partners’ water to begin with due to their iWay-or-the-highway (clever, no?) approach to “collaboration,” and I don’t think that the major game studios would take a shine to it either.

Pricing
Do you see people hitting that “purchase” button when a game costs more than $10? Neither do I. Real games cost upwards of $40-50 when they come out. That won’t fly in an App Store or iTunes environment, where the emphasis is on multiple small, easy-to-swallow buys.

Brand
Apple doesn’t do games. They don’t put out games, they don’t make it easy to play games, they don’t encourage developers to make games for their platform. This is the last time Apple and Mac users were excited about games:

Seriously. Ever since the Great Halo Disappointment, nobody has considered Apple’s gaming enthusiasm as being anything other than a lark. Meanwhile, Nintendo is so completely identified with games that one implies the other in almost any context, Microsoft is hard at work building a gaming platform that dovetails with their entire ecosystem, and Sony is actually gathering steam with the PS3, as its lower price leads more people to find that it actually might be the most powerful and versatile system on the market. Apple struck at mobile phone makers when they were at their most complacent and vulnerable; gaming consoles and companies are stronger and more successful than they’ve ever been. It would be an insanely bad time to take a swat at them.

Content
Pop quiz: what game had the most lucrative launch of all time? If you answered Modern Warfare 2, an extremelyviolent and graphic game being accused of turning kids into terrorists, then you are correct! Apple is already choosy when it comes to what appears on its devices, and the kind of ultraviolence that sells games probably isn’t going to fly. Apple isn’t as positively warm and fuzzy as Nintendo usually is, but it would be a pretty major shift to start pushing games like MW2.

They don’t want to
Don’t you think that if Apple had any inclination to make the iPhone or Mac into a gaming platform, they’d have at least shown a little of that by now? Where’s the gamepad accessory for the iPhone? Why isn’t Apple courting the big developers to get some titles on Macs? There’s no indication that Apple is interested in games except as a class of apps to take a cut on. Almost all game development so far has been driven by the “there’s gold in them thar iPhones” mentality.

They don’t need to
This readership more than any other should be aware of Apple’s solvency in this worldwide financial crisis; indeed they have thrived mightily. The iPhone shows continual growth, they gain a tenth of a point of OS market share every month or two, and they’re making money hand over fist via iTunes and the App Store. Why the devil would they want to get into gaming, a market that would expose all the company’s weaknesses, bring their best hardware to its knees, and complicate their entire strategy — one which is working perfectly? I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t like to rock the boat, but they don’t do it when they stand a good chance of being thrown in the drink.

All that said, Apple does have an increasing presence in gaming. It owes this in no small part to Nintendo, which has popularized casual and mobile gaming to a huge extent with the Wii and DS. The iPhone may take a bite out of the more casual games coming out for the DS, but beyond that I don’t see a major effect. And as long as it’s enough for Apple to make a few bills, they’re not going to try too hard to change that.

UnwiredReview found the patent and shared it with the whole wide world.

Computerworld tested a few other keywords, including “buy Windows 7″ and “Windows 7″ itself and the ads didn’t appear. Clearly they are looking for a “different” type of customer.

Why are the targeting pirates? It doesn’t make a lot of sense but it does make sense for Apple to target folks who are on the fence about Windows 7 and could be looking to download the OS for free rather than making the total jump. Those same swing-users could be swayed to roll over to OS X given enough prodding.

So basically what this thing does is power and charge a MacBook and iPhone (or any USB device) simultaneously. The battery pack even runs at both 16.5V and 18.5V like the OEM Apple chargers, which means the battery shouldn’t be put under any unnecessary strain.

There are three sizes available: 60 WH, 100 WH, 150 WH. These things aren’t cheap either. All three models use a lithium ion battery pack that can be recharged up to 1000 times and are encased in aluminum to match the MacBook. The 60 WH model runs $199, with the 100 WH and 150 WH models fetching $299 and $399 respectively but also coming with a free DC MacBook Car Charger. Pricey, yes, but also one of the only solutions to run a Mac for extended periods.

[Koyono via MacNN]