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For those of you not following the Psystar and Apple story, this is a brief summary:
- Psystar (small company that no one has heard of) announces that it is selling an open Mac, meaning a computer running OS X not made by Apple.
- Everyone wonders if it is legit or if it is a scam until the review units come in.
- Apple, after a long delay, sues Psystar, Psystar says it will fight.
- Psystar acquires lawyers known for having defeated Apple in the past.
- Psystar announces it plans to counter sue Apple over complaints, claiming that locking OS X to specific hardware violates anti-monopoly laws.
Through all of this, the general consensus seems to be that Psystar is small and Apple is big, so they will be able to fight off the suit. I don’t agree. The fact that Psystar started selling the open Macs in the first place signaled from the beginning that they intended to fight the suit. There are only two possible reasons for this. Either Psystar is crazy or they have something up their sleeve and think they can win. I don’t think they are crazy. Apple is going to have to fight hard. I don’t think Psystar is “likely” to win, but I would give it a much better chance than others seem to.
So, supposing Psystar did win, what would happen? Just to clarify, this would mean that anyone could create and sell an OS X-running PC, just like anyone can sell a Windows-based PC. I think it is clear that Apple’s current bussiness model, which depends very much on hardware, would not work for long. The real question is how adaptable can Apple be? If Psystar wins, is all lost for Apple, or at least for their computer business?
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Of course it’s not lost for Apple. More like a good business lesson for them…
Psystar & companies that’ll spring up doing this will only help promote the Apple platform. How can that be bad for Apple? Unless they make a really stupid move and really pursue cracking down on these companies, blindly ignoring the fact they they along have been having a very hard battle alone all this time, Apple’s position will only benefit from this.