Clones’ Attack!

In the last months, Apple had to face a dark side of its success - cloning. I am not talking about the iPhone, because most successful mobile phones get cloned in record time. Until Apple moved to Intel Core processors, it was extremely hard to clone a Mac computer, but now it's pretty easy to setup a desktop computer using hardware components that you can buy virtually everywhere and make it run Mac OS X Leopard, and that's exactly what has been happening pretty often in the last months...


Before the last incident, a notorious Mac cloning case was that of the US-based company called Psystar, which announced last month its own Mac clone, a desktop computer that comes with Mac OS X Leopard preloaded, and has a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo microprocessor, 2GB of DDR2 667 RAM, an integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics card, 20x DVD+/-R drive, 4 USB ports, and a 250GB 7200RPM drive.

While Psystar Corporation's clone mentioned above is supposed to cost $400, a certain eBay seller, chris555, was offering two similar systems for $549.99, as AppleInsider reported yesterday. The funny part of the entire story is that someone has done something to its entry on eBay, because now all you can see is the "This listing (160236944431) has been removed or is no longer available. Please make sure you entered the right item number. If the listing was removed by eBay, consider it canceled.[..]" message!

It's interesting to see that Apple is suspiciously silent regarding this matter, and the best part for third parties trying to sell such computers is that a 1984 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision held that a software publisher can't require consumers to run an operating system on a specific type of hardware, but...

In the end, I guess everyone could buy Mac OS X Leopard and setup a computer to run it. As long as you're not going to sell it on eBay, the only problem should be the fact that you won't get any customer support from Apple... or am I wrong?