It looks like the first phase of the Apple / Psystar Mac cloning saga is winding towards a conclusion, as the two sides have just filed to wrap up their case with the California court that ruled decisively in favor of Apple last month. As you probably expect, Apple hasn’t ceded much ground here: Psystar’s agreed to be deemed liable for illegally copyin g OS X Leopard, bypassing the OS X kernel encryption in violation of the DMCA, and breaching Apple’s EULA, all to the tune of $2,675,050. In return, Apple’s dropping its various trademark and unfair competition claims, and has promised to hold off on collecting any cash until the various appeals have run their course. Now, considering Apple and Psystar are currently engaged in pretty much the exact same case in Florida over Snow Leopard, we’d say th at this agree ment isn’t much more than a way for both sides to save money and move on to that fight: Apple’s already won the bulk of its case against Psystar in California, and spending money to litigate trademark claims we thought were weak when we first read them doesn’t really buy S teve any leverage he doesn’t already have, while Psystar probably needs to scrimp all the coin it can.

There’s one other little wrinkle here, and that’s exactly what Apple’s eventually going to be able to prevent Psystar from doing. It’s certain t hat the California court will bar Psystar from preloading machines with Leopar d, but Psystar’s arguing that its new Rebel EFI software shouldn’t be covered by any decision, since it wasn’t part of the ca se. That’s an interesting argument and definitely worth s ome consideration — but it’s got some holes in it since Psystar’s now admitted tha t it’s liable for contributory and induced copyright infringement and violating the DM CA. As we’ve said before, Psystar’s essentially doing with Rebel EFI what Grokster got smacked by the Supreme Court for d oing in 2005: it’s trying to build a business around the knowing copyright infringement of customers, and that usually doesn’t fly. We’ll see what happens — and Florida awaits.

W hen PC lover Will Urbina was finally forced to switch to a Mac by market forces (he’s a video editor, and most everyone these days wants you to use Final Cut Pro), he didn’t give up easily. In fact, he spent the next few months kicking and screaming his way through a rather painful process, a process which finally gave birth to a mutant: The OS Xbox Pro.

Faced with “the distasteful choice of either setting foot in an Apple store” or buil ding his own, Urbina went the home-made route, building a PC into a first-gen Xbox Dev Kit he picked up for pennies, and then hackintoshing it. The case of the Dev Kit is taller than the retail box, which turned out to be helpful: Urbina wanted to match the specs of a $2,500 Mac Pro.

With some literal hacking and rebuilding, he managed to squeeze in four hard drives (a pair of 7200rpm, 500GB drives in RAID 0 conf iguration for Final Cut, plus slower 160GB drives for bot h OS X and Windows 7), external USB SATA, and Firewire port s and even a rather odd-looking Apple logo on the top. The hackintoshing aspect was taken care of by the amazing EFi-X dongle, a little plug-in widget that lets you install a retail copy of OS X onto any PC hardware.

Urbina made a few curious decisions, especially gi ven th at OS X 10.6 is moving towared moving much of its heavy lifting to the GPU, or graphics card. Because the case is so small (even an optical drive was left out), Urbina had to use a 300 Watt power supply, 100 Watts short of the juice needed for his chosen NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT card. Instead, he popped in a lesser card and beefed up the CPU to an Intel Core 2 Duo Q9550s. This reliance on the CPU to do the work clearly shows his PC bias. The specs:

In tel Core2 Q9550S @2.93GHz

Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3LR

Sparkle GeForce 9800http://www.willudesign.com/OSXboxPro/osxboxpro9.jpg GT

8GB Crucial Ballistix 1333MHzhttp://www.willudesign.com/OSXboxPro/osxboxprotopless1.jpg

Highpoint RocketRAID 26401

2x 160GB 5400rpm Seagate Momentus HDD

2x 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Momentus HDD

16GB 1.8” Super Talent MasterDrive KX SSD

EFiX USB V1

Not bad for $1,500. Urbina says that the equivalent Mac Pro would run to $4,500. We think it a little odd that a professional would go down such a route to build a work machine, though: If yo ur wages rely on a working machine, a hackintosh is a little scary. Still, thi s thing looks awesome, and wit h all that hardware inside such a tiny case, we imagine that the fans will stay true to the noisy, leaf-blowing Xbox original.

OS Xbox Pro product page [Will U Design]

See Also:

Psystar 'Rebel EFI' Patch Installs Snow Leopard on Any P CEFiX Dangles Hacki ng Dongle Before Apple’s Lawyers

The story keeps getting worse for Psystar, a small Florida-based startup that was selling Mac clones. In its court battle with Apple, a judg e recently found Psystar guilty of violating Apple’s copyrights. What’s more, the payoff for being a rebel was meager for Psystar: the startup sold only 768 sy stems, according to an economist App le hired to analyze Psystar’s business records.

On top of that, Psystar told investors that it projected it would sell between 1.45 million and 12 million machi nes in 2011. The small company opened shop in April 2008; Apple sued three months later. 12 million units? Talk a bout absurdly optimistic.

768 shipments is a puny number, but I’m not all that surprised. Back w hen I worked as an editor at Macworld, I remember how difficult it was for us to order a Psystar desktop for lab testing. Only after numerous attempts did our order go through; the process felt shady from start to finish. Also, I would imagine that the people who are nerdy enough to desire — and put up with — a PC hacked to run Mac OS X would take it upon themselv es to build a Hackintosh of their own (like Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel and I did with our netbooks).

Plus, I can’t imagine man y would opt to throw money at a company that’s battling Apple’s legal sharks. That circumstance brought the longev ity of Psystar, and its ability to provide customer support, into question. Psystar’s spin for investors is even more bizarre: Psystar argued that its leg al battle with Apple would frighten off other potential competitors, thus insulating its success. However, plenty of businesses offering Hackintosh solutions have emerge d throughout the course of Psystar’s fight with Apple.

ComputerWorld, the first to report this story, happened upon a slide presentation containing the shipment projections, which Psystar showed to venture capitalists in 2008. Get the f ull story there.

See Also:

Psystar ‘Rebel EFI’ Patch Installs Snow Leopard on Any PCPsystar Marches Forward With Beefy Mac CloneApple, Psystar File to Protect Secrets Before Battling in Court …Judge Dismisses Mac Cloner Psystar’s BankruptcyMac Copycat Psystar Gets Ammo to Countersue ApplePsystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way …Psystar: Apple Is Paranoid for Alleging Conspiracy

Photo: Psystar

The Vaio X, aside from being thin and light, is notoriously d ifficult to mod — simply put, there’s not much room in there to play around! Besides, when you’ve spent well over a grand for a machine, you’re not necessarily going to be gung-ho about digging in with your soldering gun. Still, when InsanelyMac forum member Asama was struck by inspiration (in the form of a Vaio P OS X image) he followed his heart — and, much to the world’s amusement, it installed on the Vaio X with few complications. Sure, it wasn’t a flawless operation: the WiFi card is unsupported (as you probably guessed) but, that said, this is definitely an item of note for all the Hackintosh freaks in attendance. Indeed we ‘re looki ng forward to seeing Psystar get sued over a similar hack at some future junction. Get a close r look after the break.

Windows 7 plus Google’s Chrome browser is an excellent netbo ok combination.

The two together make pretty good use of a netbook’s most limited resources: screen size and processor power. The result is a surprisingly pleasant combination for browsing, working in GMail and Google Docs, and other lightweight tasks.

In other w ords, Google might be onto something with its plans to make a Chrome-based operating system for netbooks.

Over the weekend, I finally got around to upgrading the computers at home to Windows 7. As part of the chore, I also switched my MSI Wind hackintosh to Windows 7. It had been functioning primarily as the kids’ computer, although I use it for work in a pinch — for example, I used it wh en I was covering the Google Chrome OS press conference in M ountain View last week — and occasionally for checking e-mail at home. Running OS X on the Wind was a way of making it easier for the children to use, but it had persistent drawbacks: For instance, the trackpad didn’t always behave as expe cted, and the screen was sometimes squashed into the left two-thirds of the display, leaving a big black bar along the right side that only disappeared after rebooting.

That’s not a criticism of OS X. After all, it’s not made to run on a netbook, and by forcing it to do so, you have to be willing to accept the tradeoffs and bugginess that come with any ha ck. And, while I like working with OS X, one of its chief advantages to me is the seamless way it works. In short, working with a hacked version of OS X on nonstandard hardware takes away most of the operating system’s advantages.

In that light, it&# 8217;s clear that Microso ft has a far more challenging job in building operating systems, because it has to make Windows work acceptably well with a wide range of computers, processors and accessories. It’s a credit to the Redmond com pany th at Windows 7 works as well as it does on a netbook, and while it hasn’t entirely eliminated Vista’s annoyances (such as confirmation dialogs and an overly-aggressive automatic update system that sometimes reboots the computer, unpredictably, while I’m in the middl e of doing something), it goes a long way towards making Window s more “transparent.” For the most part, it just works, and doesn’t get in the way, while I concentrate on my work.

Adding Google’s Chro me browser to Windows 7 complete the picture for the netbook user. That’s because Chrome is lightweight and fast, rendering pages (especially JavaScript-heavy ones, like Gmail) especially quickly. And because of the compact way it presents the address bar, tabs and toolbar — especially if you’re using the “Minimalist” theme — more of the screen is available to display web pages — no small consideration when you’re working with a tiny 9- or 10-inch LCD.

Windows 7 may not be as speedy as a stripped-dow n Linux distro, but on the other hand it is familiar, runs well enough, and appears to support every component on the MSI Wind without trouble. By deep-sixing Internet Explorer and repl acing it with Chrome, it becomes the best netbook option I know of.

Photo (of an MSI Wind netbook running Windows Vista) by Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com