Pizza Box or IMac? No, an IBox

wired news ^ | 4.2.03 | Leander Kahney

[freepatriot32]

A Minnesota man has plans to launch his own Macintosh-manufacturing business, building a low-cost, upgradeable Mac called the iBox.

John Fraser, a 21-year-old engineer from Chanhassen, Minnesota, is finalizing the design for his flat "pizzabox" Mac and hopes to go into production in three to four months. If successful, Fraser will be the first third party to make a Mac since Apple shut down its three-year experiment in clone licensing in 1997.

Unlike the world of Windows PCs, which has many hardware makers, Apple is the only company making Macs. Apple doesn't license its operating system to outside hardware manufacturers

[freepatriot32]

"I always wanted to build Macs," said Fraser, who runs a part-time PC customization business, 2khappyware. "But I want to get Apple's full support. I want to make sure I'm on the up and up. I'm an Apple supporter. It's not something I want to clash with them about. I want to make sure what I'm doing is legal."

only in post dmca amerika would you haveto worry about being sued and put in federal prison for building computers its waaaaaaaaaay past time the dmca was repealed and all the sponsors of that particularly soviet piece of legislation were impeached

[jae471]

So will these look like the classic Sparc pizza box machines?

[Wacka]

It has nothing to do with the dmca. It has to do with patent laws and infringement on patents.

[1stFreedom]

I'd buy one.

I love OS/X.

And take note linux geeks, Mac HAS SOFTWARE and DRIVERS that work nicely. AND IT RUNS LINUX PROGRAMS.

[freepatriot32]

[1stFreedom]

The MAC is what Linux wan'ts to be, and visa versa. I haven't met a linux fan who hated OS/X.

Maybe it's the future of linux, to be hooked on to a widely accepted OS. Get the best of both worlds.

[Ben Hecks]

Recently, some of us were wondering what the market would be for an iBook with no LCD and no keyboard......just a small, flat computer with Firewire, USB, Optical drive, monitor output, etc.. A unit of that size using an LCD monitor would be very compact and ideal for anyone with restricted space. Looks like this guy did it. I hope he succeeds.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Only the non-gui ones. I can't wait until Mac gets xfree so that I can run xwindows programs on it. I'm especially interested in using the GTK+.

That said, I have to admit that the Jaguar GUI is a lot sharper than KDE (which I also love).

[Billy_bob_bob]

I like this concept, and I really like the idea of an "entry-level" Mac that can run iPhoto and iMovie on Jaguar or Panther. I wonder what Mr. Jobs thinks about this?