Secured Guest Account on OSX Yosemite.

I notice something interesting with the new Guest login on Yosemite. If you have an encrypted file-system, the guest login is completely different from the normal guest login of a non-encrypted drive.

With an encrypted filesystem (File Vault), you have to re-boot into an ultra-secure mode. This is almost analogous to a Chromebook and I like it. The new guest mode only has one app running and that is Safari.

Once in guest mode, the user has no other access. He/she cannot access any applications nor can they browse the filesystem.

For comparison, here is the guest mode on my iMac also running Yosemite without File Vault. The original guest mode has desktop, application and file system access.

So if you are running a full file-vault, the guest mode will be a complete surprise. I can see some people not liking it; preferring it to the original mode. I personally like it as it appears to be more isolated and there is little to no chance a user can see anything on my drive as it is intended.

Reviewed: Kanex Thunderbolt to eSATA + USB 3.0 Adapter . A cheap Thunderbolt USB 3.0 alternative.

The most referring request to my website is a Google search query for a cheap Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 adapter. This comes up in the statistics everyday. I've also read countless forum requests for such a device. Before today, the only option was a Thunderbolt docking station. Thunderbolt docking stations are not portable and they start at $199.

Today, I have the next best thing: The Kanex Thunderbolt to eSATA + USB 3.0 combo adapter. No, it isn't that simple single Thunderbolt to USB adapter that everyone wants but having the eSATA add-on comes in handy. You can also get a similar device that supports USB 3.0 + Gigabit from Kanex as well.

As you can see, this model has both the blue Superspeed port and eSATA. The construction feels solid. The Thunderbolt end cable is permanently affix;making this officially a dongle. Having the cable permanently built in means you save $40 off the price of cable. However, I do feel the cable should have more girth and thickness.

This is fairly priced at $79. I was hoping for something around $40 but this is the closest thing you will get to a cheap Thunderbolt - USB 3.0 bridge. Is it expensive? I don't think so considering a USB eSATA would cost you $30. I think this matches fairly with those card-bus PCMCIA expresscard USB  3.0 adapters. $79 is also cheaper than the next option up which is $199. Furthermore, you don't have to buy a $40 Thunderbolt cable to use this.

The unit is driverless for  OSX 10.8.4 and above. Windows users can download a driver for Windows 7 and newer. I didn't have a chance to test it with my Windows Thunderbolt PC so I can't comment on Windows functionality.

Here it is in action with a USB 3.0 drive and a eSATA RAID5 attached.

A few important notes:

First it does support full 5.0 Gbps USB 3.0 throughput.
eSATA port also supplies port multiplication. SATA is up to 6G speeds.

Below are screenshots from the system profiler.

And from a 2011 27" iMac with no superspeed USB 3.0 ports.

 Now, with a simple upgraded accessory, other 2011 Thunderbolt Mac owners can have superspeed USB peripherals connected at 5Gbps.

The only negative is that it does not have a Thunderbolt daisy chain port. This will be the last item on your Thunderbolt bus. This isn't a problem for an iMac since it has two ports but I can see where an Air owner would be concerned.

This device is ideally designed for Macs with Thunderbolt produce in 2011 like the 27" iMac that I have. My two other Macbooks have USB 3.0 built in. For newer macs, this is a tougher sell product.

Testing:

I tested this on my 15" Macbook Retina Pro. Since my Macbook has built in USB 3.0, I wanted to see how it compares. I've tried various USB 3.0 sticks and 2.5 inch drives and none of them had any connectivity or bus powering issues. It will definitely power most USB 2.5" external drives. So you don't have to worry about that. It won't, however, power multiple drives due to the power draw.

For my testing, the main things I am looking for are:
USB 3.0 speeds and compatibility.

eSATA speeds.

USB 3.0 Speeds.

Just for point of reference and comparison, I used a Samsung 830 SSD and OYEN USB 3.0 enclosure. I've used this in the past so it is a good reference for my old readers. I tested this with the on-board Macbook's USB and through the Thunderbolt Adapter. Here are the results.

With the KANEX adapter.

Macbook On-board USB 3.0

2011 27" iMac w/ Thunderbolt and the Kanex. Note, the iMac does not have onboard USB 3.0

The results are very close. The Samsung/Oyen is an older drive but the Macbook Pro already has an optimally fast USB 3.0 internal bus so this fares very well. I didn't have any faster drives on hand to see if it could push higher speeds (UASP).

eSATA Notes.

So how does this fair to the Seagate Thunderbolt "hack" solution featured here? Well, it is more elegant. But there are also USB to eSATA dongles out there in the market place.

Last year I tested an USB 3.0 eSATA NewerTech dongle. I tried to compare it to the KANEX but the NewerTech USB 3.0 dongle didn't mount my SANDIGITAL RAID. That particular dongle (and many other USB 3.0 to eSATA) tends to have problems with larger disk arrays.

The KANEX adapter had zero problems. The RAID box was a SansDigital TOWERRAID TR4UTBPN that was reviewed here.

The RAID is a RAID5 4 drive array and here are the results. Considering the eSATA threshold, it did very well giving me in excess of 160 MB/sec writes.

For comparison, last year's review of that box in RAID5 connected to Window's machine directly to an internal eSATA port. There is a bit of a discrepancy compared to the Windows test because the RAID is formatted NTFS which will run slower on a Mac platform.  Furthermore, I had about 3TB filled out of the 9TB.

I would say the results are very close and very good.

The Seagate Thunderbolt "hacked" solution faired a little better and you can read it here: http://fortysomethinggeek.blogspot.com/2013/11/cheap-thunderbolt-esata-solution.html
However, now, the Seagate is no longer the cheapest solution. This is.


There is a small gripe about the eSATA. However, it isn't the fault of KANEX. I was hoping it had eSATA-P support. Not all eSATA adapters have this so it isn't something to knock a point away. eSATA-P is a dual USB combo port that powers portable eSATA devices. like this below.

With the Kanex adapter, I couldn't power a stand-alone SSD as you see above.

Up close, this is how an eSATA-P port looks like. It is a dual socket that allows you to connect USB or eSATA. It also powers whatever SATA device you connect to it. I think the reason KANEX didn't go for anything like this because 1) I've never seen an eSATA-P with USB 3.0 speeds and 2) Having two USB ports may be too big of a power draw. Thus, the dongle is limited to something like gigabit ethernet or eSATA in addition to the single Superspeed USB port. The other eSATA-P adapters I've seen and used (ExpressCard) had to use an extra USB port to get power.

Update:

The Kanex Adapter does provide booting off eSATA. I've successfully tried it and it works without incident. However, you cannot boot off a USB 3.0 drive. As you can see in the following picture, I was able to boot 10.9.4 off a eSATA SSD enclosure. However, if you plan to do this, you have to be aware of the drive getting ejected if the computer goes to sleep. Thus, adjust your power management settings accordingly if you plan to boot off an external SATA drive.

Note. Booting is YMMV. According to different sources, booting is not officially supported and some have difficulty. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

Things to Note.

Again, these are not major faults but some things to address and consider.

You can only connect so many devices. It is only rated to power a certain amount of power as specified by USB specs and how much Thunderbolt can provide. I had mixed results between my Macbook and iMac. Do not to expect to power multiple 2.5" drives off a portable USB 3.0 hub. It can't be done. Now, if you have a powered hub, then it isn't an issue.

Next, the Thunderbolt cable should have been a little bit longer to accomodate the iMac. As you can see in the picture below, the adapter doesn't fully rest to the base of the table.

I also have an issue where an Edimax USB 3.0 802.11 AC adapter will not run on my iMac as it hangs.

However, the USB wifi card runs fine on my two Macbooks. It could be a driver issue so I will look into that. I've tried a USB sound DAC and all other USB 2.0 devices worked without issues.

Conclusion.

So far I like it. Do I have real need for this device when I already have the handy and great Caldigit Thunderbolt dock? Yep, I suppose so. Instead of buying another dock at $200 for work, I can use this where I have a lot of eSATA devices. I'd plug this in at the end of my Thunderbolt chain and plug my powered USB 3.0 hub which has gigabit ethernet built in. I'd still have a single cable connected to my Macbook in most instances.

This also comes in handy for my 27" iMac which doesn't have USB 3.0 but two un-used Thunderbolt ports. I reckon, I'd us the iMac more now.

I can see people opting for the USB 3.0 Plus Gigabit alternative also sold by Kanex. Obviously  I can see the combo USB/Ethernet can be handy for Macbook Air owners I know.

Updated Conclusion:

I thought about this a bit more after I wrote my initial review. Come to think of it, the eSATA is really the key selling point for me. Since I already have USB 3.0 on my newer macs, I don't need the Thunderbolt to USB converter functionality as much as eSATA. The only other Thunderbolt - eSATA is the LaCie which goes for $199 (without Thunderbolt cable).  I also happen to have a few eSATA enclosures that can be put to good use. I can also buy a dual SATA 6 eSATA dual bay enclosure for $80. Then if you add the price of this adapter, you can have a Striped Thunderbolt RAID set-up for under $200. Actually, if Kanex comes out with a Thunderbolt to eSATA + Gigabit adapter for $80, I would immediately pick that up too. However, based on the voice and opinions I read online, I think the this Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 was smart move. I bet this will be a very popular device soon.


Price: $79.99 direct.
Link: http://www.kanexlive.com/thunderbolt-esata

First attempt at VMware ESXi 5 on Apple Xserve

A few post back, I wrote about converting real physical Macintoshes into VM (Virtual Machine) guests. Today, I am going to blog about my first attempt of installing VMware ESXi 5 hypervisor Virtualization server on a 2009 Apple Xserve 3,1. This was the last Xserve before Apple discontinued the line.

The purpose of this exercise is to see if I can recycle some old Xserve to hosts and consolidate older Mac OSX servers running Quicktime and Indesign services.

Installation was a breeze. I had an ISO and hit the "c" key at boot and selected the CDROM. Installing ESXi 5 was no different than installing it on a Dell. I picked a 8GB USB stick and installed everything onto a bootable USB stick. Once prompted to reboot, I had to hit the option key to choose the USB stick which happened to be properly EFI made.

I then configured my IP and logged into the Xserve through the VMware view client. I couldn't format one of the disks from the Xserve's SAS bay. VMware recognizes and it probably has some baked Apple firmware on it. I'll try with a different disk later. However, I was able to mount iSCSI and NFS shares to test.

I was able to load up my Linux and Windows VMs with no hassle. Getting a OSX guest will take me some time to figure out. I converted a Fusion guest with the ovftool but was not able to install my guests. I will play with it more and report back.

Right now my Xserve only has 6GB of RAM so I'll need to max that out and try adding eSATA or SAS storage to the ESXi build. My Xserve has an internal 128GB  boot SSD so I may try re-installing on that or create a datastore on it.

Convert a Physical Mac into a VM Guest under VMware Fusion 5

In the PC World, there many cool migration tools to convert a live, physical and running Windows machine into a VM (Virtual Machine) guests. I have migrated quite a few using VMware's own migration tool and they work great. Converting Linux and OSX isn't so easy.

OSX makes it much more difficult but it is not impossible. I plan to convert some Apple Xserves into VMs and consolidate them into a few running ESXi 5. That will be a later post as I am getting my feet wet; figuring this out and sharing it to those interested.

This tutorial will use VMware Fusion 5. You will need Fusion 5. It doesn't cost much and apparently the licensing allows you to install on 3 macs which is way cool.

I have switched completely over to VMware Fusion 5 from Parallells and VirtualBox on the Mac platform. It makes it  easier to convert a VMware machine build into something I can import into ESXi. The difference between Parallels, I won't go into here but so far, I am digging Fusion. I really like the fast suspend.

To Clone a Physical Mac there are a few things you need to consider. 

1)Is it legal?

Well, Servers from 10.5 can be virtualized. Workstation/Desktop (non-server) OSX 10.7 and 10.8 can be virtualized. For my use case, yes, I am completely legal.   I am converting a 10.6.2 Snow Leopard server. I'll even try as far back as 10.5 if any of those still exists in my inventory. There are back-door step (changing a plist file) to virtualize 10.5 and 10.6 non-server but I won't go there.

2) You need to build a base OS build from scratch to act as your Cloning "middleman." This should be a minimal Mac OS X VM guest build just big enough to run something like Carbon Cloner

3) You should have a spare USB drive or network share to store your "cloned disk images."


How To Convert  a Physical Macintosh into a VMware VM Virtual Machine.

It is a multi-step process so I will outline how I successfully converted a few Macs.

Step 1. Clone your Physical machine using your cloning tool of choice. CarbonCloner is the most popular. Clone it to a Sparse Disk Image. It makes it easier to transport and store multiple clones. Do not try to clone to a drive and use it as your source. It will probably be a waste of disk storage and you wont be able to boot from it in your VM. Stick to creating DMG images you can clone to.  I won't go into details how you do this but there are probably hundreds of tutorials on cloning your mac on the internet. If you are a mac IT pro reading this post, it is most likely you've already done this.

Step 2. Build your "middleman" OSX build. Here, you have to actually install a full running OSX that runs inside Fusion 5. Trust me, it is pretty easy unlike various hack attempts in the past. No pseudo hackintosh in a VM or special CD-ROM iso boot disk. It is a straight install as if you are installing on to a real Mac.

I chose something simple. I did a quick install of 10.7. You can even install from a DMG. I believe I used the ESDInstall extracted from the app store download. The whole process took 20 minutes on my setup and the size was around 12 GB for a virgin system. I simply stored my build on an external drive that I can shuttle around.

OK. We've gotten this far. At this point. I would strongly suggest backing up your middleman OSX so you can re-use again if you want to clone more physical Macs. You will end up discarding the middleman's drive when you are finished.

Step 3. Add additional Virtual Hard Disk(s) to your "middleman" OSX build. In my example, I added two more just for the sake of experimentation.

Step 4. Boot into your middleman OSX, format your additional virtual drives and prep them for destination clone. Remember to format them GUID.

Step 5. You should have your sparse disk image from Step 1 from somewhere accessible by the middleman OSX. You can copy from the network or from a share if your guest's OS drive is big enough.

I much prefer using a USB drive with all my builds. Simple. Just plug in an external USB drive and allow Fusion to take ownership. USB 3 is supported on Macs that have USB 3. The VM will see the USB mounted mac drive as a mounted external drive just as your normal hosts sees it.

Step 6. The Clone process. If you've gotten this far, you are 90% done. Run Carbon Cloner or whatever cloning tool you have to clone your sparse image to your second or third newly added virtual drive. Let the clone process run the usual course as you would clone a real mac.
As you can see in the screenshot,I am cloning from my sparse disk image.

Step 7. When finished, shut down.
If you think you can reboot into the next step, you will be in for a big surprise. This is the error message I got from trying to boot a 10.6.2 server from a 10.7 middleman install. Unfortunately, there are probably boot flags and indentifiers that restrict what can run/boot on what OS.

You might be safe and and skip to Step 9 of you are cloning from the same build as your middelman OSX. For example, cloning from a real physical 10.7 Mac if you were using my example.


Step 8. Now, this is the most important step I had to figure out. Change your Virtual Machine's device setting. It is not easy to find and not so obvious. Click on the "General" under the System settings.

And this the part that is not so obvious. The Name and OS look like normal labels.

But they are actually clickable input fields. This is my pet peeve. It shows a lack of UI (User Interface) understanding in the most fundamental way in regards to how applications should be designed.  The gist of this section is, you have to change the OS device label to the updates guest should be running. My original build was 10.7 and now, I had to now change it to 10.6 so I can boot into a 10.6 build.
To boot back to my middleman OSX, I would have to go back and change the OS device label back to 10.7

And that is pretty much it.

Step 9.  Select your new Virtual Hard disk as the new boot drive under "Startup Disk" from the main Settings. Reboot and test your new guest VM.

And Voila! An older 10.6 Xserve build running inside Fusion on my Macbook.


At this point, you should just delete the original drive containing the bootable "middleman" OSX. You can remove it from your inventory from the settings. Now, you should have a full running clone of your existing physical mac. You may want to install VMware guest tools but for me, I will wait till I have my builds migrated over to ESXi.

So far I have a few Macs virtualized and I will undergo some testing before I embark on building out an ESXi 5 build on a physical 12 core XServe which will host these new Mac guests.

There you have. Hopefully this will help some people looking to virtualize their macs.

Extra Credit for Mac IT guys:

And a little extra tidbit of info. If you are looking to doing this as a failover precaution due to the fact Xserves are no longer being sold, you can do scheduled nightly clones from a live running real mac. In essence,have a VM guest that is continually synchronizing with a live mac in the event the live mac fails and the VM guest can take over.

This is my style of ghetto IT that works:

You would need to set up two Carbon Copy schedulers. One on your live Mac and one on your middleman VM mac.

Either your live mac or VM Mac would need to share out a volume or have both access a shared network storage. The Live Mac would backup nightly to a sparse image on the shared network volume. Then schedule the middleman mac to clone from that nightly backup to your new VM second drive. You would need to schedule them apart to let the live mac to finish it's clone. Usually it should be quick because Carbon Cloner doesn't do a full clone on subsequent clones. It only copies the incremental. You can also use SuperDuper, Chronosync or old fashion rsync. With rsync, you just need to add the -E flag to copy extended attributes. I would personally run a cron job with rsync every hour to get at least an hour of synchronized data.

So in the event your Xserve (or other Mac server) physically dies, you should have a fairly up-to-date VM guest ready to be fired up and run while you go ebaying for a replacement Xserve or buy a new Mac Pro.

i7 3770K Gigabyte Ivy Bridge Hackintosh

I've decided to publish the result of my 3 months with a Hackintosh.
I have a few Macs and Macbooks around the houses and wanted a really modern, beefy, home test machine I would be using for various things. This box would be used for all sort of things but the ability to run as a hackintosh was a secondary motivating consideration. I would mostly be running ESXi and Linux most of the time. I also wanted a Mac with USB 3, Thunderbolt, 32GB of RAM, lots of drive bays, and eSATA. Hence, I decided on a Gigabyte motherboard with the new Ivy Bridge i7 3770K.

Well, to my surprise, my hackintosh is extremely well built and amazingly, insanely great!

Here is the technical run-down:

• Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UP5 TH w/ Thunderbolt
• CPU:Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) HD 4000 Graphics cooled w/ Cooler Master Hyper 212 cooler
• GPU: MSI GTX 650 TI (Nvidia Kepler) w/ 1GB DDR5
• Case: Cooler Master Scout ATX Mid Tower Case - 5 drive bays,4 internal bays
• PSU: Corsair TX650 power supply
• RAM: 32 GB of CorsairRAM
• Storage: 240GB & 180GB Intel 330 SSDs for OSX and Windows 7. Seagate 3TB 7200 rpm for data drive.
• LG Blu-Ray DVD Writer 
• Display: Dual 24" Dell IPS UltraSharp Displays
• Wi-Fi: TP-Link TL-WDN4800

I did careful research and I will share with you my findings and all the great things about this build.

First of all, this particular build is pretty much bullet-proof.
I have full SATA III 6Gbp/s speeds, Bluetooth 3 works, Wi-Fi works with the built-in operating system, iCloud/iTunes/App Store account works, and Thunderbolt (with a small caveat). The only caveat with Thunderbolt is that devices need to be plugged in and powered on before you boot the machine. That is the only small minor issue  I have with this build. Thunderbolt/DisplayLink display works too. Lastly, there is no DSDT file to mess with it. It is 95% Vanilla OSX. I remembered I had to do something with the boot flag to get the NVIDIA drivers to install. Once installed, the GPU works with CUDA extensions and acceleration for Adobe CS applications.

All I had to do was really follow Hacks by Alfa and read some posts on tonymacx86.

http://hacksbyalfa.com/post/28271035968/gigabytehackintosh

Some notes on my Build.

Get the TP-Link Wifi Card. Period. The ability to have the OS natively recognize the card and have air sharing and everything is awesome. Prior hackintoshes, I had to deal with 3rd party wifi drivers and silly applications to connect to Wi-Fi. I ending up junking  the free Wi-Fi card that came bundled with the Gigabyte motherboard. The TP-Link card is well worth the $30 bucks.

The Hyper 212 cooler is pretty good at keeping the 4-core, 8 thread i7 pretty cool. I never break 50c under heavy loads. I also think it is attributed to the Scout case and air-flow. There are 120mm fans everywhere. Air circulation is very good.

The case is an older design but it is perfect for my needs.It has 4 front USB 2.0 ports along with a front e-SATA panel on the top.

The Gigabyte motherboard has 6 or so rear USB 3.0 ports and comes with a front panel adapter for two more.

Inside the case, I have my dual Intel SSDs and 3TB Seagate drive for my onboard storage.
I also installed a Syba dual dock for quick removal of drives.It allows me to quickly swap out a 2.5 and 3.5" at the same time.

The Syba dock also gave me another two front USB 3.0 ports. With the Syba dock, I have a total of 10 USB 3.0 ports, 4 USB 2.0 front ports.

So with the rear eSATA, front eSATA,dual drive dock, I can randomly swap our 4 drives externally. I pretty much used all my SATA connectors and topped it off with an LG Blu-Ray ripper.

I figured since I used up all my SATA ports, I'd do the same for USB.I forget how many headers I have but I was able to fit another two USB 3.0 internal ports. I used them to store a USB wifi dongle for Linux (running dual wifi) and a bootable "safe OSX fix disk." This is my safety plan in case my OSX gets hosed, I can easily boot off the USB and fix whatever I need to. I haven't had to do anything since. Software and OS updates have worked fine.

The case is pretty awesome in the fact it has handle. I never realize how cool it was and I can easily lug this box around.

Since I had so many extra 5.25" front panel bays, I put in a front cubby case to store things.

Performance.

Well, it runs very fast. It is faster than my 2012 Thunderbolt 27" i5 iMac. In fact, it doubles the geekbench scores. This CPU is easily clockable. I'm getting 16,000 + geekbench easily at 4 GHZ. The iMac only scores 8229. With SATA III 6Gb/s and the Intel 330 SSDs, I am seeing 400 Megabyte/sec writes and close to 500 reads. The Nvidia GTX 650 TI isn't going to win gaming benchmarks but is more than good for me to drive large monitors. It is also accelerated for many pro apps which is nice.

Thunderbolt.

The main reason to get this motherboard is the no DSTD build. However, Thunderbolt may be another reason. Like I mentioned earlier, Thunderbolt works awesome on this. Compared to my iMac and Macbook Pro, it is just as fast connecting to a Thunderbolt SSD or my Drobo 5D.
In fact, running Windows on this same machine wasn't even as pleasant. My Drobo 5D is not recognized under Windows. For displays, I have to enable the built in HD4000 Intel graphics to power a Thunderbolt/DisplayLink display.


Conclusion.

Well, I love this box but to tell you the truth, I prefer to use my iMac. The simple truth is the 2560x1440 screen. Running two 1080p 24" Dell doesn't cut it. The hackintosh simply blows everything I currently have. I loved this hackintosh when I was testing it out in the office with 30 and 27" Cinema Displays. I think this will all change when I come up with the cash to buy me a new 27" or 30" screen for the house. I may have an eventual need to re-purpose this machine for one of my other projects I am working on. I have to admit the allure of running a fast macintosh on cheap commodity hardware is very alluring.

Will this be better than a Mac Pro? Well, yes and no. Mac Pros run full on Xeon Processor rigs with ECC (Error Correction memory modules) and you can go way higher than 32GB of RAM. ECC Ram make them by definition, superior rigs for day-to-day workflow. Xeons can come in multiple socket CPU configurations and you get up to 12 cores. My i7 is still only a consumer grade 4-core CPU.  The Xeons also come with more PCI-e lanes (I believe 40) for more dedicated cards. Hence, there is a very good reason those Macs are aptly named "Pro" machines for a reason.  However, current Mac Pros are not cheap and don't have the niceties this Ivy Bridge rig has. Namely the USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, and multiple SATA 6 Gb/s connectors. If you are a serious professional and make a living using Mac products, get a real Mac. They pay for themselves in real billable and projects.

I've thought about doing an Xeon build but that would have been way above my price range.  At that point, I would rather get a real Mac Pro. Furthermore, I haven't seen any Xeon Custo-macs with Thunderbolt and the type of I/O this machine has.

And this is where the dilemma comes in. These hackintoshes simply offer more than the Mac Minis and iMacs. This is where I believe Apple should make a mid-range "Performa" line using consumer Ivy Bridge and future Haswell architecture. Not everyone needs XEON class machines for their homes.

In the ailing days of pre-OSX Apple, I miss my original Power Computing clone Mac. I remember getting a few StarMax and Power Computing "Mac clones" that offered great expandability and affordability. Those too were insanely great machines. Anyone remembered this guy? This is what the world needs now. Cheap affordable OSX based computers.