Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. This podcast
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Verizon Hub, the home phone
Speaker 1: reinvented exclusively from Verizon Wireless. Hello everyone, and welcome again
Speaker 1: to tex Stuff. My name is Chris Polette. I'm an
Speaker 1: editor at how stuff Works dot com and sitting next
Speaker 1: to me as always a senior writer, Jonathan Strickland Dog
Speaker 1: the Gates. No, pretty good. Yeah, I've already extinguished. I
Speaker 1: could have said, uh, ish fistin is holds a bit,
Speaker 1: which is pretty much the only other German I know.
Speaker 1: Okay then, which unfortunately will just have people speak to
Speaker 1: me in German more. Yeah, yeah, you never want to
Speaker 1: do that, speaking of foreign languages and things that aren't
Speaker 1: what they seem. Yes, I think. Weren't we gonna talk
Speaker 1: about some cloons. We are going to talk about some clones,
Speaker 1: but we're not going to talk about cloning people or
Speaker 1: anything like that. No, and nor are we going to
Speaker 1: talk about the Star Wars prequels. Please less said the better. No, No,
Speaker 1: we're talking about Macintosh clones. I'm sorry, I'm still stuck
Speaker 1: on the prequels. All right, do we need to give
Speaker 1: you a second? I'm good. All right, So we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about Mac clones. And the reason why this is
Speaker 1: such a big deal in the first place is if you,
Speaker 1: if you're a PC user, you might be wondering, Okay,
Speaker 1: so what's the deal with the Mac? I mean, what
Speaker 1: what's so important about it? What's so cool? Um? You know,
Speaker 1: because PCs they come in a variety of different flavors
Speaker 1: from a variety of different manufacturers. Right, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you could you could walk into your local uh gigantoid
Speaker 1: computer electronics stores, assuming that it's still in business, and
Speaker 1: pick from two dozen manufacturers Dell, Gateway. I mean, you've
Speaker 1: got all these different asir, You've got all these different
Speaker 1: companies that make these different PCs. Um, they're all running
Speaker 1: you know of either usually either Windows or LINEX I
Speaker 1: mean mostly Windows. Uh so, but but they're coming from
Speaker 1: all these different manufacturers, and um, you know, an HP
Speaker 1: may be less powerful than Dell that's in the same
Speaker 1: price range or whatever. Uh but when you when you're
Speaker 1: started looking around at Max, there's only one source for
Speaker 1: Max that's Apple sort of Yeah, but uh one official
Speaker 1: official Jobs would have it, Steve Jobs would have it
Speaker 1: where there's only one source for MAX, and that would
Speaker 1: be Apple. So you wouldn't find a Dell computer running
Speaker 1: the Mac operating system. No, well not today, not usually.
Speaker 1: Good Lord Pete. You know there is such a thing
Speaker 1: called a hack intosh. Yes, there is such a thing.
Speaker 1: Isn't gonna this is off topic, but I'll just point
Speaker 1: out that, Um, for you, those of you who are
Speaker 1: less Mac interested, I won't say MAX SAVY, that's that's different. Um.
Speaker 1: If you're not really interested in the MAX and you're going,
Speaker 1: what are you what are you talking about? A Dell
Speaker 1: can run the macOS. It could theoretically, but you kind
Speaker 1: of have to take her with it a little bit
Speaker 1: because now that MAX run on the Intel processor. If
Speaker 1: you have a Dell with an Intel process and you
Speaker 1: want to violate lots of warranties, and you could, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could fiddle with it. And the thing is, the
Speaker 1: mac OS is generally designed to work with the parts
Speaker 1: that Apple puts in the maccatas. That's one with the
Speaker 1: reasons why it works so well. It's because it says, okay, well,
Speaker 1: you're looking for a or B it's like, oh, well
Speaker 1: I found b Well, there you go. You don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about whether or not you have a video
Speaker 1: graphics card or an A T I or you know
Speaker 1: whomever else because you know, that's that's sort of what
Speaker 1: the Windows clones are all about. So in order to
Speaker 1: in order to run it on a PC, you have
Speaker 1: to create essentially what's called an emulator. Yeah, we've talked
Speaker 1: about emulators before when we were talking about multiple arcade
Speaker 1: machine emulators. Um, So, an emulator is just really it's
Speaker 1: it's usually software, but it can be software and hardware
Speaker 1: working together that mimics the way another piece of hardware
Speaker 1: and or software works. Um, it's not a copy. It's
Speaker 1: just trying to copy what that other piece of equipment does.
Speaker 1: And people who do this generally have a varying level
Speaker 1: of success with it, depending on the kind of hardware
Speaker 1: and the age of the hardware that they're familiar they
Speaker 1: are with it, right, So, um, you know that's that's
Speaker 1: different when we we're talking clones, and that would be
Speaker 1: like you go into the store and buy an HP
Speaker 1: right out of the box, it works with Windows, and
Speaker 1: it's going to work with Windows because that's you know,
Speaker 1: it's authorized. It's a clone of the IBM PC from
Speaker 1: back in the day. So but mac clones, well that's
Speaker 1: a little different, you know, but it wasn't. Let's let's
Speaker 1: take a little walk down memory lane. Well all right,
Speaker 1: we both were going to do that at the same time.
Speaker 1: It's just pathetic that we both thought of that. So anyway,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go all the way back to the Apple
Speaker 1: two days. Yeah, that was when cloning was cool for Apple.
Speaker 1: They were happy with it. Yeah, well sometimes the laws
Speaker 1: was not so happy when they weren't. There were official
Speaker 1: licensed cloner there were, there were, but but the very
Speaker 1: the first one I'm thinking of is the Franklin Ace.
Speaker 1: Did go back. Yeah, I'm talking about way back to
Speaker 1: the Apple too. Yeah. Well, you know when dinosaurs ruled
Speaker 1: the computer world. So Franklin Ace. The Franklin Ace was
Speaker 1: a computer that came out of the Franklin Computer Corporation.
Speaker 1: And uh that was a clone of the Apple too.
Speaker 1: And um, it was not licensed. It was not It
Speaker 1: was not authorized in any way, shape or formed by Apple.
Speaker 1: And it actually became the the first success It became
Speaker 1: the the subject of the first successful attempt in a
Speaker 1: US court of law to prove that computer software could
Speaker 1: be protected by copyright. Thank you Joshua Coventry, who are
Speaker 1: a great article about this. UM. But yeah, so so
Speaker 1: way back and this is back in Uh it was
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three that um, that ruling came down where
Speaker 1: they said, okay, you know what an operating system can
Speaker 1: be under copyright, can be protected under copyright, which was
Speaker 1: a big, big deal. I mean, you know, it sounds
Speaker 1: you know, of course, it sounds like it's it's common
Speaker 1: sense now, but this was back in the very early
Speaker 1: days of personal computing. Yeah, they had to decide whether
Speaker 1: it was basically an original work. And you know, because
Speaker 1: even recordings were not covered by copyright forever and ever.
Speaker 1: You know, once the recording industry came online, if you will. Uh,
Speaker 1: the courts had to wrestle with that and try to
Speaker 1: figure out how to incorporate copyright law in for music.
Speaker 1: So every time there's some new technology like this, and
Speaker 1: you know, these authors are writing software, they're not writing
Speaker 1: a book, so they have to say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: does this protection extend And they ultimately decided it did.
Speaker 1: And uh so nineteen three, the the court makes the
Speaker 1: ruling and it's not until nine that Apple is able
Speaker 1: to uh to force Franklin to withdraw its clones from
Speaker 1: the market. But yeah, that's the earliest UM example. But
Speaker 1: if you if you move forward a few years, you
Speaker 1: start to see licensed Apple software and ending up on
Speaker 1: non Apple computers. So you want to talk about this
Speaker 1: a little bit, Well, UM, I just know that when
Speaker 1: I was in junior high and high school, the Apple
Speaker 1: two was the dominant computer and education. So when my
Speaker 1: friends had computers at home, they had one of two machines, UM,
Speaker 1: the Apple two, which was more popular and in educational circles,
Speaker 1: or the Commodore sixty four, which was more popular with
Speaker 1: I don't know people who write today's video games, because
Speaker 1: they were the kind of computers that people were writing
Speaker 1: programs for. And an Apple two was considered, at least
Speaker 1: by my friends, something of a word processing machine or
Speaker 1: something that you played Oregon Trail on. UM. So you know,
Speaker 1: I first started seeing those machines back in the day,
Speaker 1: and I think the ones that I remember seeing we're
Speaker 1: very similar to the Apple to see UM, you know,
Speaker 1: and uh, I don't. I don't remember much about that
Speaker 1: time because I was just getting my first Commonore Amiga
Speaker 1: at that point, and you know, at that point, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of blown off the Apple. We can't go off
Speaker 1: of that. I'm not going off at the dangent. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying, all right, so let's pull it back. Let's
Speaker 1: skip ahead a few years. We're gonna go all the
Speaker 1: way to the Mac years. Actually we don't have to
Speaker 1: go that far, to tell you the truth, because I
Speaker 1: remember the the the healcyon clone days of the nineties.
Speaker 1: But as I started doing research, I u site that
Speaker 1: I visit every so often called low End Mac dot
Speaker 1: com Um. They generally worked with older Macintosh computers, hence
Speaker 1: the low end name. You know, you're, oh, well, this
Speaker 1: thing is five years old. What am I gonna do
Speaker 1: with it now? Well, they have a lot of options
Speaker 1: for that. And they also had a bit of a
Speaker 1: history of the Mac cloning world. And one of the
Speaker 1: this is a good segue from our previous topic, because
Speaker 1: one of the very first cloners was a Brazilian company
Speaker 1: called Unitron, and they were licensed to make Apple two
Speaker 1: clones in Brazil. That's because at the time Brazilian law
Speaker 1: didn't allow the importation of computers, so they wanted to
Speaker 1: make maclanes. When the matt came on the market in
Speaker 1: four and around UM, they basically talked to Apple, found
Speaker 1: out that Apple was going to one stake in the operation. UM,
Speaker 1: and uh, basically Untron said yeah, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: So they essentially reverse engineered the thing hardware and software. UM.
Speaker 1: They got ten million dollar alone from the from the
Speaker 1: Brazilian government and unfortunately applectt winded their scheme. They actually
Speaker 1: got hold of a prototype that had a mac rom
Speaker 1: in it rom chip in it and as soon as
Speaker 1: they did that, they were able to prove, look, these
Speaker 1: guys are hacking off our stuff. We've got to uh,
Speaker 1: we've got to stop this. This is our intellectual property.
Speaker 1: And basically A pressured the Brazilian government to make him stop.
Speaker 1: You know, they already had a few hundred built. UM.
Speaker 1: So they essentially sold their steak, all their their plans
Speaker 1: to another company in Taiwan, backed out and there they
Speaker 1: still exist actually apparently today, but they're um, they're no
Speaker 1: longer in the Apple business by any means that so
Speaker 1: that was it really goes back that far. That's true.
Speaker 1: But if you if you think about it, jobs one
Speaker 1: of the things he was really famous for is that
Speaker 1: he wants. He wants lots of control. Oh yeah, he
Speaker 1: demands the best possible product. Um. He also is famous
Speaker 1: for supposedly knowing what the consumer wants, even at the
Speaker 1: consumer doesn't know, and that he skates to where the
Speaker 1: puck is going to be right exactly, he he Whatever
Speaker 1: it is that he offers you is what you want,
Speaker 1: whether you know it or not. But Apple decided it
Speaker 1: didn't want jobs around, and new jobs was kind of
Speaker 1: pushed aside for a while, and eventually he left the
Speaker 1: company to go found another company. We don't need to
Speaker 1: get into that because we did a whole podcast about
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs. But in the meantime, Apple that made a decision.
Speaker 1: First of all, they formed an alliance with IBM and Motorola.
Speaker 1: So then you've got Apple, IBM, and Motorola. They called
Speaker 1: the alliance aim A I M. Yeah, it's got a
Speaker 1: message on that and not wrong. That's all instant messenger.
Speaker 1: So anyway, they decided to create this new computing standard
Speaker 1: based on the power PC architecture. UM skip ahead a
Speaker 1: few more years. Okay, so they're working on this. This
Speaker 1: thing doesn't really I mean, it doesn't take off the
Speaker 1: way they wanted to. In n the summer of that year,
Speaker 1: Apple starts to license the Mac operating system to other manufacturers,
Speaker 1: hardware manufacturers. Yes, and then um, things kind of fall
Speaker 1: apart for Apple a little bit. Actually, it got it
Speaker 1: got a little crazy because when I started comparing timelines,
Speaker 1: not only were the author Ris Matt Clooners at work,
Speaker 1: other people were taking apart Apple machines and building new
Speaker 1: max like the Mick Mobile, which was a plexiglass portable
Speaker 1: Mac and UH an outbound laptop Bound was named the company.
Speaker 1: And these were all you know in the early two
Speaker 1: mid eighties, but they started to overlap into the late eighties.
Speaker 1: And that's right about the time that had started getting
Speaker 1: crunch time for Apple because they were starting to lose
Speaker 1: some money. Yeah, the Apple was really in bad shape.
Speaker 1: And they ended up purchasing the company that Jobs had founded.
Speaker 1: That and we should go ahead and say that that company,
Speaker 1: the next computing company that just that was that was
Speaker 1: not doing so well either. But they bought the company.
Speaker 1: Jobs was brought on sort of as a consultant. He
Speaker 1: ended up essentially taking taking over again, becoming the interim
Speaker 1: CEO and eventually the CEO of Apple and UH and
Speaker 1: so in September. Um they you know, the power PC
Speaker 1: processors process us, I get CENTRADID by Motorola and then
Speaker 1: Apple says, you know what, we're done with this licensing thing,
Speaker 1: and they buy back the licenses. Yeah. See there they
Speaker 1: were a handful of very popular clones, uh with from
Speaker 1: names like day Star. Motorola had the Star Max. Of
Speaker 1: course they were making the power PC chips, so it
Speaker 1: was certainly easy for them to get ahold of them.
Speaker 1: Power Computing which had a very seriou very favorable opinion
Speaker 1: because they had all these you know, fight back ads
Speaker 1: that were just very popular in the at the time,
Speaker 1: and U Max who made the super Mac and the
Speaker 1: EU Max and and power Computing were sort of the
Speaker 1: last hold overs. They really pushed back against Apple saying
Speaker 1: you know, hey, look we're building a business here, We're
Speaker 1: adding to your market here. What are you crazy? But
Speaker 1: Jobs was saying, you know what, this is not the
Speaker 1: way I envisioned computing, um and I if I can't
Speaker 1: do it my way, it's not gonna get done at all.
Speaker 1: And so he was very much adamant on getting back
Speaker 1: all those licenses and and really dictating why it means
Speaker 1: to you know what a Mac product really means in
Speaker 1: the marketplace. He he wanted to make sure that that
Speaker 1: was his vision and not someone else's. And by his vision,
Speaker 1: we should go ahead and say, of course that he's
Speaker 1: not necessarily the one who designed all the really pretty
Speaker 1: Mac features, but he certainly um is the one who
Speaker 1: champions them well, and and he is um. He is
Speaker 1: the was the founder of next and next step was
Speaker 1: the operating system ran on those boxes, and that basically
Speaker 1: provides the underpinnings, or at least it did when he
Speaker 1: first came out with OS ten or OS X as
Speaker 1: it appears on boxes UM or all sex as I
Speaker 1: call it, right, UM, So you know it's it's not
Speaker 1: like they they had him come back just so they
Speaker 1: could have him back. I mean, they actually got some
Speaker 1: very valuable technology out of it and essentially changed the
Speaker 1: way McIntosh computers operate completely, you know, once they incorporated
Speaker 1: those changes. So let's skip ahead now pretty much to
Speaker 1: present day, really to last year, UM, and they're gaining
Speaker 1: market share back and they have beautiful products that people
Speaker 1: like to spend money for. Yeah, so now you get
Speaker 1: to a point where Jobs has has pretty much proven
Speaker 1: his worth to the company once again. I mean, he
Speaker 1: brought it from the brink of bankruptcy back to I
Speaker 1: guess it's most profitable ever really, UM and people are
Speaker 1: more people were buying MAX. I think at one point
Speaker 1: it reached it about a ten percent share in the market,
Speaker 1: which is pretty phenomenal really when you consider they were
Speaker 1: down below five at the time at the low point.
Speaker 1: So that's that's a lot of computers. That's millions and
Speaker 1: millions of computers. So now we're at a point where
Speaker 1: all the max are again coming only from Apple, all
Speaker 1: the authorized max are coming only from Apple. And now
Speaker 1: we have this other company that popped out of seemingly
Speaker 1: nowhere called side Star p s y s T A
Speaker 1: r UM. This is a Florida based company that claimed
Speaker 1: that what they were going to do was sell a
Speaker 1: low end, a low price computer UM that is going
Speaker 1: to run the Mac OS ten operating system. It was
Speaker 1: not going to be a Mac You were not going
Speaker 1: to buy a Mac computer that was just marked down.
Speaker 1: It was going to be made out of off the
Speaker 1: shelf computer parts but running the Mac OS and UM. Again,
Speaker 1: this is one of those things where you have to
Speaker 1: make sure that your equipment is going to run this
Speaker 1: OS properly because it's designed for a very specific hardware
Speaker 1: set up, and um, you know, without the Apple ROMs,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have sort of a limited experience where you're
Speaker 1: definitely gonna you're definitely gonna have to do some workarounds
Speaker 1: to to be able to get the operating system to
Speaker 1: to perform correctly. Um. And one of the big drawbacks
Speaker 1: to the side Star approach is that they have said
Speaker 1: that they are not able to guarantee products support that
Speaker 1: everything's gonna work exactly the way it's supposed to. What
Speaker 1: they're guaranteeing is that you can buy a much cheaper
Speaker 1: computer running the Mac operating system then you would if
Speaker 1: you were to go to Apple directly. And I mean
Speaker 1: that might be true. And for for a while people
Speaker 1: were wondering if this was even a real company at all.
Speaker 1: Um I read, uh, I read a report from Charles
Speaker 1: Arthur from The Guardian, and he did some investigative reporting
Speaker 1: and it was it was very uh interesting. He first
Speaker 1: was looking to see where this company was located and
Speaker 1: discovered that the address had changed while he was looking
Speaker 1: for it. The original address was apparently in the middle
Speaker 1: of this suburban area in Florida, and the second address
Speaker 1: was in a more industrial area. So there's that question. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a question of are there other entities behind size
Speaker 1: Star that are really interested in just taking Apple down,
Speaker 1: taking the whole Mac computer down a few notches, um,
Speaker 1: and opening it up to make it to make it
Speaker 1: a more open environment, because as Mac Apple is very
Speaker 1: famous for being a very closed environment. Um, it's part
Speaker 1: of what makes them Apple side Star argues that Apple
Speaker 1: has created a monopoly because it's the only you know,
Speaker 1: they're the only ones who offer any equipment that can
Speaker 1: run the Mac os, and therefore it's, uh, it's you know,
Speaker 1: a monopoly on that operating system. UM. Apple for its part,
Speaker 1: argues that it holds the copyright and therefore anyone trying
Speaker 1: to to put this software on an unauthorized computer is
Speaker 1: violating their copyright as well as their end user license agreement.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. End user license agreements aren't law. Well,
Speaker 1: it depends on whom you ask. Well, I guess we're
Speaker 1: gonna find out because they're not law. Right now. It's
Speaker 1: funny because when I made that point about copyright earlier
Speaker 1: and how they have to make these decisions based on
Speaker 1: emerging material like this, This really is going to force
Speaker 1: the hand of judges. And I'm suing plural because it's
Speaker 1: going to keep going. You know, as soon as one
Speaker 1: side loses, they're gonna appeal. So this probably is going
Speaker 1: to go high up in the courts, and it's not
Speaker 1: a schedule to go to court until November two thousand nine.
Speaker 1: For their part, I I know that size Star claims, hey,
Speaker 1: we bought the OS off the shelf, therefore we are
Speaker 1: allowed to use it. Apple doesn't seem to find that
Speaker 1: hold much water. No, there end user license agreement specifically
Speaker 1: states that you can only use the Mac operating system
Speaker 1: on and on Apple hardware. Well, there you go. So,
Speaker 1: but the question is does is the end user license agreement?
Speaker 1: Is that actually binding? UM? I thought it would be
Speaker 1: interesting to kind of run down a comparison of the
Speaker 1: the product that size Star offers versus a basic iMac
Speaker 1: oh by all means, So here we go. For five
Speaker 1: and ninety nine and nine cents you can buy from
Speaker 1: side Star. The Open three, which runs the Mac OS
Speaker 1: ten Leopard version ten point five, has a two point
Speaker 1: eight giga hurts do duo or dual core processor. Um
Speaker 1: it's got two gigabytes of d d R to eight
Speaker 1: hundred memory. It's got a five hundred gigabyte hard drive. UM,
Speaker 1: it's got a DVD burner, it's got the g E
Speaker 1: Force eight four hundred graphics card. But you don't get
Speaker 1: a keyboard, you don't get a mouse, you don't get
Speaker 1: a monitor. There's no Bluetooth support, there's no FireWire support,
Speaker 1: and there's no wireless support. So those are things you
Speaker 1: do not get with that. Now with an iMac. The
Speaker 1: iMac comes with a two point six six giga Hurts processor.
Speaker 1: It's not as powerful. It comes with two gigabytes of
Speaker 1: d d R three rams, so pretty pretty comparable to
Speaker 1: the Open three three gigabyte hard drives and not as
Speaker 1: much space. UM it's got a DVD burner, but it's
Speaker 1: not as fast as the other DVD burner, the one
Speaker 1: in the Open three. UM, it's gonna it's gonna the
Speaker 1: video g E Force graphics processor, which technically is better
Speaker 1: than the other one. But it also comes with a mouse, keyboard,
Speaker 1: It has the twenty monitor because that's built into the
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the iMac UM. And it has wireless
Speaker 1: and a webcam and come with some software and right.
Speaker 1: That one costs twelve hundred dollars, so it's twice as much.
Speaker 1: So the question is if you throw in the monitor,
Speaker 1: the keyboard, the mouse, a webcam, a wireless uh you
Speaker 1: know card, things like that, how much more would the
Speaker 1: Open three be. It'd be a little bit more, and
Speaker 1: it still wouldn't be as expensive as the as the
Speaker 1: the iMac. My question is is it worth trying to
Speaker 1: save a couple hundred bucks when you know you're not
Speaker 1: going to have the support that you would get from Apple.
Speaker 1: There's no guarantee that you will be able to keep
Speaker 1: that machine because there may be a recall in the future.
Speaker 1: I mean, does it make sense to buy one? In
Speaker 1: my opinion, the answer to that is no, thank you
Speaker 1: for listening. No, No, I totally agree with you because,
Speaker 1: I mean, okay, so you don't want to spend an iMac,
Speaker 1: but you do want an excellent, you know machine that's
Speaker 1: going to be reliable. Well, then by a PC clone
Speaker 1: that comes from a reliable source as an authorized copy
Speaker 1: of Windows on there. That way you can be assured
Speaker 1: that you're going to be okay. I mean, people who
Speaker 1: switched to lennox Um there's some support, but it's not
Speaker 1: you're not paying for support. Um, of course there's a
Speaker 1: very robust community that helps out with that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: But I mean, if that, you know, makes you a
Speaker 1: little squeamish, then you know you're probably going to opt
Speaker 1: for in general on Windows or a Mac computer. And
Speaker 1: you know, then the the options sort of drop away
Speaker 1: because you start going, well, you know, I just don't
Speaker 1: trust these guys. I don't really know much about them.
Speaker 1: And if Apple doesn't like them, if they're not authorized
Speaker 1: and they release an update that bricks my computer, that's
Speaker 1: not good. And I think also that a great deal
Speaker 1: of the appeal of Mac comes in the form factor.
Speaker 1: I mean, Max are gorgeous machines. There's no getting around it.
Speaker 1: They are beautifully designed. And uh, I'm not so sure
Speaker 1: that that many people would be like, you know, I
Speaker 1: just want that operating system. I don't care if it
Speaker 1: looks boxy, you know. I mean, it's it's a style
Speaker 1: an esthetic question, not just a you know, performance question. Well,
Speaker 1: otherwise Vista and Windows seven wouldn't look like they do,
Speaker 1: and uh, the Ubuntu community wouldn't be working so hard
Speaker 1: on trying to improve the look and feel of its interface. Well,
Speaker 1: it's obviously he's serious. It's not just the interface I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. I'm talking about the actually hardware. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, you look at an iMac. It's a beautiful machine,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean it's just and the power box,
Speaker 1: everything that. All of those look very nice, so um
Speaker 1: what they can charge extra for them? I'm thinking that
Speaker 1: size Star may very well be an effort to bring
Speaker 1: down Mac and and less of a viable business model. Right,
Speaker 1: so you're going to conspiracy theory route. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to call it conspiracy, not calling it a conspiracy, but
Speaker 1: but I would not be surprised to learn that the
Speaker 1: ultimate goal of size Star is not to try and
Speaker 1: sell these computers, but rather to try and take down
Speaker 1: Apple's stance of keeping a closed system. Sort of like
Speaker 1: the politicians who have no chance of hades of getting elected,
Speaker 1: but they bring up considerably different issues just to get
Speaker 1: them out there. At least they say similar to that.
Speaker 1: So basically they're not really there to make a buck,
Speaker 1: They're there to raise these issues and get these barriers
Speaker 1: broken down. I would I would not be surprised to
Speaker 1: learn that. I know, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but
Speaker 1: I would not be surprised to learn that. I'm a
Speaker 1: fan more of the os anyway, So it would be
Speaker 1: nice if it's spread to more people, unless, of course,
Speaker 1: that means that more people right viruses for it, in
Speaker 1: which case never mind. But um, you know, so not
Speaker 1: exactly anti size Star necessarily. I would like to see
Speaker 1: that they, you know, can work things out and maybe
Speaker 1: have some license clones. Again, I don't know that it
Speaker 1: would necessarily be a problem for Apples, which Steve says,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, it depends if jobs is still there.
Speaker 1: I don't see it happening. Well, I just don't think
Speaker 1: of that. I don't think it will happen. But I
Speaker 1: think that's a good discussion on Mac clones, which of
Speaker 1: course rings us around too. Oh listener mail. This listen
Speaker 1: mail comes from Kimberly, who also made a request for
Speaker 1: an episode topic. But we're playing on tackling that in
Speaker 1: the future, so I'm just gonna take the last little
Speaker 1: bit of her email. I really enjoyed the April Fools podcast,
Speaker 1: especially when you mentioned thinking the whole time you were
Speaker 1: talking about their many product gags, I was wondering when
Speaker 1: you'd get to the soundtrack T shirt True to form.
Speaker 1: You guys did mention it. I've had my eye on
Speaker 1: that thing for a while, but being a poor college student,
Speaker 1: it's kind of on the back burner. Thank you again
Speaker 1: for all the informative podcasts, and I hope there will
Speaker 1: be many more in the future. Kimberly, Well, thanks Kimberly. Um,
Speaker 1: there definitely will being many more in the future. There's
Speaker 1: no way of gainner around that. Uh, And I too
Speaker 1: want to think geek shirt. I asked for it for
Speaker 1: I had that on my Christmas wish list if you
Speaker 1: remember way back when that was on my stocking stuffers.
Speaker 1: Many podcasts Ago, any many podcasts AGO. I have yet
Speaker 1: to receive that, probably because my wife has threatened everyone
Speaker 1: we know with bodily harm should I receive such a gift. Um,
Speaker 1: there's no way. I would not be able to enter
Speaker 1: a room without playing the music from the Good, the Bad,
Speaker 1: and the Ugly. It's just that's the way it is.
Speaker 1: And I'm talking everywhere. I'm talking work too, so I
Speaker 1: would not be popular here either. I would definitely need
Speaker 1: a laugh track, right yeah, yeah, I mean that would
Speaker 1: at least get some last for your jokes. Zing Instant
Speaker 1: rim Shot said trombone. Thank you very much, Kimberly. If
Speaker 1: any of you would like to write us, you can
Speaker 1: do so at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: And remember, you can go to our website read all
Speaker 1: up about different technical issues and interesting articles. That's at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. If you look to the right,
Speaker 1: you'll even see links to our blogs where Chris and
Speaker 1: I blog every single work day blog blogs, sometimes more
Speaker 1: than once if we get really antsy, it's true, So
Speaker 1: check it out, take a look, let's know what you think,
Speaker 1: and we we'll talk to you again really soon for
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