New company to start selling Mac clones

Posted on by Dan Moren, Macworld.com

You’d think that Apple’s legal issues with Psystar over the sale of generic hardware running Mac OS X—and the clone-maker's subsequent bankruptcy filing—would have scared off any other company from picking up that business model. Of course, you might also think that “Bing” is a great name for a search engine. But I digress.

As our former Macworld colleague Jim Dalrymple reports at CNET, Psystar’s woes haven’t discouraged newcomer Quo Computer. Not only does the company plan to start selling Mac clones on June 1, it plans to do so from its very own brick-and-mortar store in the Los Angeles-area, as well as via the Internet.

Quo plans to offer three distinct models at launch, and while pricing and specs aren’t yet available, the company’s founder, Rashantha De Silva, suggests the machines' pricing will start under $900. As to the issue of legality, De Silva says:

“[Apple] probably will (sue us),” De Silva said. “There are others doing this, but we have a different attitude. There are thousands of people in the ‘Hackintosh’ market, but many of them are creating bad products. I don’t think anyone wins in that environment.”

Instead, De Silva said that Quo will focus on making quality products and producing excellent customer service.

Of course, that sidesteps the real issue. In the Psystar case, Apple alleged that the clone-maker was violating Apple’s End User License Agreement (EULA), and the same could be said for Quo, though the company will reputedly make customers agree to the license when they purchase.

Competing on quality seems like a losing proposition for Quo, given that Apple has always focused on quality itself, and the the people who typically flock to clones are interested in one things: lower pricing. If the price advantage over Apple’s own machines is only slim, it seems likely that many will opt to stick with the genuine article. And great customer service is well and good, but it's not much help if a company gets sued out of existence.

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