Mac clone company Psystar appears to be as fake as the Macs they make

April 16, 2008

Mac clone company Psystar appears to be as fakes as the Macs they make There’s a lot of news these days regarding Mac "clones" made by the Psystar corporation. This company does not appear to be real in the physical sense. Add to that, earlier the online store was not accepting orders because it could not process credits cards.

Looks fishy, doesn’t it? Gizmodo did a little more digging and found some rather interesting information.

The Miami Chamber of Commerce and BBB (Better Business Bureau) have no information about a company called Psystar and the physical address of the company changed mid-day, yesterday and two times today alone.

The first address listed was residential and the second address belongs to a company called USA Koen Pack which has been there for the past two years. The new addresses as of today are near the same locations but there is still no Psystar to be found.

On its store page the following was displayed for a time,

"Thank you for visiting Psystar. We’re sorry but the store is temporarily down due to the fact that we are currently unable to process any credit card transactions. Please send an e-mail to support@psystar.com with the subject line "UPDATE" so that we can update you when the store comes back online. For customers who have already placed orders: if you received a confirmation e-mail then your item is in queue to be built and shipped."

Psystar’s main officers are listed with many other companies as well, many of which appear to be shady, at best. Of all the companies listed there is only one active. It just goes to show you, with prices that top $2,200 for a high-end Mac "clone" something is obviously fishy; if you think about it.

I certainly wouldn’t send them a check or give them a credit card number or personal information of any kind. Unless, of course, they actually manage to send one of these "clones" out for review. But, that’s not likely to happen before Apple gets its hands on them because installing OSX on non-Apple hardware is against the EULA for Leopard nor does Psystar have the blessing of the OSx86project which it claims the technology is based on.