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Psystar "Definitely Still Shipping" Mac Clones
Preedit writes "Continuing its defiance of Apple, Psystar is reassuring customers that it is "definitely still shipping" its line of Mac clones. And, in a further nose-thumbing at Steve Jobs, Psystar this week said it's now making Leopard restore disks available to its customers, even as Apple insists that Mac clones sold to date be recalled.
In its story on the latest developments, Infoweek is reporting that tiny Psystar apparently has no intention of backing down in its legal dispute with the much larger Apple."
That reputation may apply to their software, but it doesn't apply to their hardware. Even Apple fans acknowledge that the first generation of almost anything is rather likely to expose some pretty significant flaws that, for some reason, never revealed itself during testing prior to release. I recall the overheating MacBookPro line... That should have been pretty darned obvious. But not every Apple fan acknowledges this... I had a vice president in my company acknowledge that he waited more than 4 hours to get the 3G iPhone and he has been rather disappointed in various aspects of its performance since.
Does this qualify as fanboy bullshit? Why? I'm just saying if you don't like it, don't use it. But the facts speak for themselves. People hate Vista, the average Joe can't/won't figure out linux, and people generally enjoy the Apple experience.
Those opinions you express are not facts. They are, as you accurately phrase it, 'fanboy bullshit'.
Psystar is going to win this as long as Apple sells their OS as a boxed product.
Insisting that Apple's separately sold software has to be run on Apple's hardware is an unenforceable and illegal tying arrangement under US antitrust law. This exact issue has come up before in 734 F.2d 1336 DIGIDYNE CORP. v. DATA GENERAL.. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled: The issue presented for review is whether Data General's refusal to license its NOVA operating system software except to purchasers of its NOVA central processing units (CPUs) is an unlawful tying arrangement under section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1 (1976) and section 3 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 14 (1976). We conclude that it is.
That's clear enough.
In antitrust tying cases, it's very unusual for a tying provision in a contract to be found legally enforceable. A more common situation is that some victim of a tying arrangement wants a court to compel the company in a monopoly position to do something, like sell them spare parts. Even then, the tying company usually loses.