Last year we have spoken about what seemed to be the future eldorado of Hackintosh, the USB key EFI-X.
It made it possible to the owners of PCs (with the specifications close to the Mac) to easily create Hackintosh. It was enough to connect the key before installing completely the standardl Mac OS X.
A little time ago, the company announced that version 1.0 of its key would not function with Snow Leopard and that a new version, 1.1, would be needed.
Tom's Hardware UK reports the story of the administrator of the blog AsereBLN who was irritated by this news and decided to see what this key contained.
After having removed the black epoxy resin that protected the components from inquisitive eyes, he was surprised to see that it did not have much more than in a banal USB key and than this product should not cost more than 10€ to manufacture; however it is sold for more than 200€.
One may have thought that the price was justified by the software development, but he also decided to decipher the firmware of the key and found there… open source code developed by OSx86 group and hardly any attempt to hide it.
He thus decided to shout about this in a high voice on his blog, and to even propose an open source clone of EFI-X, the EXI-X.
It was learned that the manufacturers of the EFI-X key decided to prosecute him. We will keep you informed of the current situation during this process and we ask you to moderate your remarks in the reactions to this information. We have made some efforts during the drafting of this so that no-one can reproach us, since we have only reported the facts without making any assessment. Make of this as much as you like.
