Psystar sues Apple over Snow Leopard

In what is sure to be a waste of time, Psystar has decided to file an antitrust suit against Apple because they can’t violate Apple’s end user licensing agreement by running OS 10.6 on their computers.  Psystar’s lawsuit claims that “By tying its operating system to Apple-branded hardware, Apple restrains trade in personal computers that run Mac OS X… and monopolizes the market for ‘premium computers.’” This is via a Computerworld article that can be read here.

If we condense that statement down, it reads that Apple ties the operating system that they wrote and support to the hardware that they designed and sell.

Psystar is quick to bring up the Sherman and Clayton acts, legislation designed, in the late 19th and early 20th century, to protect consumers against monopolistic practices and conspiracies to monopolize with regard to interstate commerce.

Problem with that logic is the legislation they refer to was put into place to protect consumers against things like price discrimination when it came to business purchasers and exclusive dealing agreements - one could try to argue that Apple has done this with the hardware and software - but they would be unlikely to make that argument stick since it is from the same company.

Senator George Hoar, one of the authors of the Sherman Act, noted that the law does not apply to companies that “got the whole business because nobody could do it as well.”  In this case, Apple has designed and put together the hardware, wrote the software, and packaged it all together.  There is no conspiracy to fix prices or to push others out of the market.  Everyone that has a contract with Apple to sell Apple products gets them at essentially the same price.  They simply require that an operating system that they own is used on hardware that they make.

Why not allow the software to be used on different hardware?  Apple has an image to maintain, that image would be damaged if people started to use OS X on non-Apple hardware because if something went wrong people would likely blame the operating system first.  It would not be Apple’s responsibility to test out OS X on Psystar’s hardware or to make sure that it works flawlessly; they have no responsibility to check to see if the latest version of their packaged software has any issues with whatever processor or motherboard combination that some third party has decided to use.  Testing aside, nothing makes people as angry as calling up technical support only to hear that the operating system that they are using is not supported at all by the people that made it.  And Apple will not provide support to OS X on a Psystar any other non-Apple piece of hardware.