Saturday, July 19, 2008

Apple flexes and stifles competition

apple_psystar_sued_lg

You may have heard that Apple recently filed a lawsuit against Psystar.  Psystar is a maker of Mac clones complete with Mac OS X.  They are being sued by Apple for disregarding and modifying the licenses for the Mac OS in computers that they sold.

Whether or not this is true, this new lawsuit is troubling, especially for Apple. 

Apple is famous for being totally proprietary.  This means that they don't let anyone make components or peripherals for their computers.  You can only get replacement parts from Apple. 

Then Psystar pops up offering Mac clones that cost a little over $500.  That is quite a bit less than similar Macs.  These computers have open components which make them much easier to fix.

This situation reminds me of the IBM PC.  When it first released their version of the PC, IBM had features that no other company had.  A group of techs got together and created a product that did the same thing.  The result was called Compaq.

Psystar is doing the same thing that Compaq did.  Apple should cut Psystar some slack and before they know it they will be selling more copies of Mac OS than ever before.

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