Psystar vs. Apple

The “clone” vendor Psystar has recently launched an attack against Apple and is suing the company for anticompetitive practices:  “Apple’s tying of the Mac OS to Apple-labelled hardware is ‘an anticompetitive restraint of trade”(Psystar lawyers).

Psystar’s main line of defence appears to that Apple’s user licence accompanying OS X is invalid claiming that  the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) is anticompetitive because it allows OS X to run only Apple hardware.

“What we want to do is to provide an alternative, an option. It’s not that people don’t want to use Mac OS, many people are open to the idea, but they’re not used to spending an exorbitant amount of money on something that is essentially generic hardware” (Rudy Pedraza, owner of the Florida-based company).

The idea  of having an  “open” PC where users are free to install onto it whatever OS they want is indeed a great idea, and if users buy an Psystar OpenMac system and install Leopard, probably Apple won’t bother chasing up owners to tell them that their install of OS X violates the EULA. Apple will mostly take the same approach as it did with the iPhone and release updates that would trash this “non-official” installations.

    Sphere It