
Review: EFiX Dongle Perfectly Transforms PC to Mac - soundsop
http://gizmodo.com/5049756/review-efix-dongle-perfectly-transforms-pc-to-mac
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jws
For a certain value of "perfectly". He had to acquire and install a 32 bit
copy of Windows Vista to update the firmware of the dongle for it to work with
his video card, even then it can only find half of his video RAM. His machine
only runs at 800MHz FSB despite being a 1066MHz machine and though he claims
it to be a Mac Pro now he is missing one processor (two cores) off the low end
configuration. But when he compares his new machine to an old Mac Pro
benchmark he can beat it in most categories.

I assume he is stealing the copy of OS X since in his dollars and cents
calculations he only counts the cost of the dongle. He is certainly violating
the license.

On the more interesting side... the dongle is perhaps just a USB drive (with
nifty anti copying technology), but packaged so it has to go inside the
computer so you won't be tempted to share it around between machines.

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blasdel
It's just a bootable USB flash disk with an EFI emulator on it.

It's not remotely effective as a 'dongle' if there isn't any special hardware
-- the best it could do is check the USB device identifier in software as it
boots up. Expect a disk image to be available via public trackers soon.

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Zev
So basically if you use hardware identical (or almost identical) to what Apple
sells, you can build a machine on your own that runs? Maybe it's just me, but
this seems to be more of an exercise in how to stick it to Apple, rather then
a legit reason (is there any?) for running osx86.

