Mac Clone Computer Maker Psystar To Shutter
SAN FRANCISCO -(Dow Jones)- Psystar Corp. is in the process of closing down its operations, a move that follows a court decision earlier in the week barring it from selling products already found to have violated Apple Inc. (AAPL) copyrights.
Context & Ripple Effects
Psystar spent 2009 fighting a losing legal war of attrition with Apple: the Miami OEM had sold OS X on generic PC hardware since 2008 while arguing that Apple's restrictive licensing violated U.S. monopoly laws [[a:1183243]], and it kept expanding the product line even as the case wore on, announcing a Mac notebook clone and a Blu-ray desktop in October 2008 [[a:1183849]]. Mid-year it brought in Camara & Sibley as counsel hoping to turn the case around.
The turning point came in November, when the court rejected Psystar's first-sale defense outright [[a:1186410]], and this week's ruling went further — barring sales of any product already found to infringe Apple's copyrights. Dow Jones now reports the company is shutting down, though Computerworld's same-day pickup quotes the lawyer disputing that, so the closure itself remains contested even if the legal position does not.
First-order effects
- The injunction removes Psystar's only revenue source: every product it sells has been found to infringe, so the Miami-based OEM cannot legally ship anything while the ruling stands.
- Psystar's antitrust theory — that Apple's hardware lock-in violates monopoly law — dies alongside the business, since the court sided with Apple's right to tie OS X to its own machines.
Second-order effects
- Other would-be Mac cloners lose their template: the first-sale and copyright rulings give Apple a ready-made playbook to shut down any successor that tries the same OS X-on-generic-PC play.
- Apple's control over Mac pricing and margins is reinforced at the low end — buyers who wanted cheaper OS X boxes are pushed back into Apple's own lineup or gray-market Hackintoshes outside any warranty.
Third-order effects
- If the rulings hold through appeals, they set structural precedent that copyright can enforce hardware-software bundling, narrowing first-sale arguments for pre-installed software industry-wide.
- The episode closes out the recurring 'Mac clone' cycle documented since at least 2005 — vendors periodically test Apple's licensing walls and get litigated out — leaving vertical integration as the settled structure of the Mac market.
The trend: Copyright enforcement is becoming the decisive tool by which vertically integrated hardware vendors defend closed platforms against third-party compatibility makers.