Psystar
 |
|
| Industry | |
|---|---|
| Fate | Dissolved |
| Defunct | 2012 |
| Headquarters | 10475 NW 28th Street, Doral, Florida, USA |
Psystar Corporation was a company based in Miami, Florida, owned by Rudy and Robert Pedraza which sold "Open Computers". These computers, first announced in April 2008, had the option of being pre-installed with Mac OS X Leopard, making them the first commercially distributed "hackintosh" computers. In November 2009, a U.S. Federal District Court ruled Psystar violated Apple's copyrights in doing so. Some of Apple's "trade secrets" officially entered into public view as a result of the lawsuit in January 2012.
Rebel EFI was a shareware product from Psystar that helped users to install Mac OS X on "regular" x86 computers. The Rebel EFI was not an original work of Psystar, but was based on an open source program called boot-132 from the OSx86 Project.
Early efforts to research Psystar shortly after their announcement of a Mac clone in April 2008 resulted in questions regarding the company’s very existence and just how legitimate they were. Several addresses were provided (five in four days) and Psystar was taking credit card numbers but not processing them because their processing company, Powerpay, had revoked Psystar’s account "for three primary reasons: product/services not as represented in application, sales volumes grossly exceeded, no address verification utilized"; and there were claims that their website had malware on it.
The developers of the OSx86 Project claimed that Psystar did not get permission to use their code and then reworked their license so that it specifically forbids commercial usage.
As part of Apple’s discovery process it was revealed that in 2008 Psystar presented a slide presentation in hope of raising $24 million from investors. “Under its conservative projections, Psystar told investors it would sell 70,000 computers in 2009, 470,000 systems in 2010, and 1.45 million machines in 2011. The firm’s aggressive growth model, however, put those numbers at 130,000, 1.87 million, and 12 million during 2009, 2010, and 2011, respectively.”
However, the reality was quite different. “ ‘Psystar produced incomplete financial records,’ Dr. Matthew Lynde, who works as an economics consultant for Cornerstone Research, said in a declaration during trial. After digging through invoices, purchase orders and other documents, Lynde was able to pinpoint only 768 sales of machines with Mac OS X pre-installed. Psystar did not challenge Lynde in his analysis of financial records.
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