On Dec 9, 2009, at 3:48 PM, Stewie de Young wrote: > > There is no doubt in my mind that as soon as someone starts up a > project like this to sell Apple hardware with a Mac OS then Apples > legal dept would be knocking at the door quick smart with a cease > and desist order. > At the very least I'd say they would take more than a passing > interest in this. > In saying that though , I'd love a Pismo or Wallstreet with the > grunt of a MacBook Pro
Actually...possibly not. You're talking about selling an "upgrade" for a Pismo; this is not much different than the G4 upgrades OWC sells and such, however, from all the folks chiming in I have a sneaking suspicion that exactly NONE of the people so enthusiastic about the idea have ANY clue about how much work this entails. You're talking about developing a custom motherboard utilizing modern chipsets that interface with the myriad connectors both standard and undocumented present in the rest of the Pismo, AND making and selling it cheaply enough that people too cheap to buy a modern mac laptop will buy one. Good luck. LOOK at a laptop logic board sometime. This ain't 'hobbyist' level work. People who can design entire motherboards tend to be paid quite well; they alo tend to have very large companies supporting them, too, because it isn't a cheap process. Surface mount electronics are finally starting to be more mainstream in the hardware hobby hacker world, but as a rule are still largely confined to a handful of components per board. Designing and making that thing will cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars right up front. Short production runs of complex circuitry like that costs a staggering amount of money...the ONLY reason laptops are cheap is that if you make thousands of them you can set up an automated factory line to crank 'em out. This is one reason the Pentagon ends up with $13,000 hammers and the like: if you need 20 pieces of a complex circuit you're going to pay exponentially more per piece than if you want 20,000. A more sensible approach would be to scour modern Intel-based laptops for a logic board you can cram into the Pismo case and replace the LCD panel with the one from the donor laptop (or decipher the undocumented LCD connector for the Pismo, and fabricate an appropriate adapter for the video on the donor motherboard). Oh yeah, and the power subsystem. And the optical and hard drives. Don't forget the sound, and the correct connector for the wifi. Then treat it as a standard Hackintosh, and go from there. But this would be the casemod to end all casemods. Post pictures when you're done! -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Books, a group for those using G3 iBooks and PowerBooks (we run a separate list for G4 'Books). The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g-books Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
