Andrew Johnson complains: "I bought a brand new Mac Mini at an iStore 2 days ago. Today they released a faster better machine for less than I paid!! Thanks Apple!"

Apple Stores have a 14 day return policy (at least in the USA) and in the past they've been happy to refund your purchase price if you want the new machine OR they've given people a small sum as compensation to folks who complain if they'd rather keep the first machine.

Remarkably decent, really.

To be clear, a close perusal of the axiotron.com site confirms that they presently offer this only for the original macbooks, but they hope to have a revised shell casting available in "mid-2009" to serve the new ones. El Reg has had a bit of a cock-up on the press release comprehension front.

So far as Apple is concerned, for OS X licensing this _is_ an Apple-labeled product, just resold in a modified case. Axiotron sells through distributors in the US and Canada, with each responsible for warrenty service.

Reading their forums, I see the Axiotron CEO was an Apple engineer on the Newton and some other products, and the company is an Apple Premier Developer, though I'm not sure if that signfies more than dropping a few grand on ADC membership.

A friend has had one of these since August. It keeps the bottom shell of the MacBook intact, with the motherboard and peripherals. The top shell/keyboard and display are lopped off and replaced with a digitizer and display similar to the Wacom Cintiq digitizer/LCDs.

I believe they get some kind of accomodation from Apple to buy the base shells sans display which probably lets them offer the new units so inexpensively (relative to the conversion)

Axiotron does not have much software of their own on the beast, relying on Apple's Ink system and Wacom's tablet driver software. My friend does illustration work on hers, and I expect that's what most of them are used for, rather than a specialized vertical application

With production of 45nm chips being limited, they're selling them as more expensive Xeons and QX (extreme) packages.

Intel has always been very canny at making the most money they can.

When production ramps up significantly and the demand for upgraded servers moderates, they will release the lower cost desktop chips.

Steve Jobs is, in fact the Devil.

Macs use a completely different pre-boot system called EFI, rather than the traditional BIOS which loads a known boot block address from disk and starts executing it. So there'd be a big software effort to write an EFI environment for your chipset.

Then, I believe Apple Intel Macs also have a "Trusted Platform Module" which gives some kind of secure way to verify the the identity of the machine and who manufactured it.

I'e seen photos on the web of someone's machine supposedly booting MacOS in a virtualized EFI environment, but it was supposed to take over an hour to boot.