Gizmodo: Psystar Looks Like a Hoax

by , 4:40 PM EDT, April 17th, 2008

Psystar announced on Monday that they're selling a Mac clone for US$399 that will run Mac OS X. Now that whole affair appears to be a hoax, according to Gizmodo on Thursday.

The Psystar site went off the air for most of Monday. Then the physical address started changing with dizzying frequency. Credit card transactions online were not secure. Finally, the company was unable to take credit card numbers altogether.

"Yesterday, we decided to take it a step further and see if they actually exist, in the physical sense," Gizmodo wrote. "How could a company so brazenly challenge Apple and have little to no record of actually being a company? We sent the Gizmodo army down there to get pictures of both their supposed addresses, and found that they're as much vaporware as the Phantom Console of yore."

Like a detective story unfolding, Gizmodo followed the address changes, checked the physical locations, took pictures and pointed to web links that actually downloaded files. It was all very suspicious. They came to the conclusion that no one should buy anything from Psystar until they've cleared everything up.