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El Reg reports:
An outfit called "Hacbook" is channeling Psystar, offering Mac OS laptops for US$329.
The laptops are actually refurbished HP EliteBooks, with a 14-inch, 1600x900 display, Sandy Bridge i5 CPU, 802.11 a/b/g/n, up to 1TB of disk, and 8GB of RAM. That's a spec Apple could have sold you in about 2013.
[...] The machines ship with no operating system but do include an installer its makers say "shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes to set up."
Jack Kim, one of the people behind the project, suggests you buy an OS X licence from Apple.
[...] "We're merely selling kits that users can then do whatever they want with afterwards."
"It's optimized to run OS X, but you can install Linux or Windows on it and use it however you want--that's completely up to the user. If Apple contacts us with concerns we'll work together to solve them."
[...] It's not the first time someone's run up a version of OS X on much cheaper hardware. Those with long memories will recall Psystar, which fell victim to Cupertino's lawyers in 2009.
I wondered if these things come with Secure Boot--which I prefer to call Crippled Boot (orig)
or Security Theater Boot (orig). One source said that HP's 8460p did not. (orig)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @12:09AM
Elitebooks are the best "prosumer/business" builds, on par with the Dell Latitude/Precision line (and miles ahead of anything Lenovo has released since 2007), but they have one annoying little aspect: to disable the trackpad and use the trackpoint only, one must be using a Microsoft Windows OS. It is software-driven. (Dell is the clear winner here: not only is the trackpad/trackpoint controlled by BIOS functions, but so is battery management, display brightness, and the keyboard backlight making the featureset as platform agnostic as possible &&&& Dell has a github repository of Linux drivers now). Does this laptop address that issue, or will my palm accidently highlight and delete a fuckton of text on macOS?
Side note: In college and for a little while after graduating I worked a side job at a UPS depot, where all of your laptops are actually sent when you send them in to the "factory" under the "manufacturer's warranty." This is done to reduce turn-around time. I was Dell/HP/Lenovo and Panasonic certified and repaired thousands of machines. The Thinkpads were absolute trash even in 2012-2013 and probably had the highest failure rate of all. They didn't even have captive screws. Even today I see Lenovo selling P50's for $2k with the shittiest, TN-quality 4k panel on the market. In terms of build quality, it was Toughbook > Latitude/Elitebook >>>>>>> Thinkpad.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Thursday September 01 2016, @02:47AM
My X1 Carbon has been rock solid...of course I bought it for $700 off retail by getting a refurbished model. Maybe you just put it back together correctly?