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Originally Posted by SaltyDawg
Well I am not a lawyer so you probably know a lot more about this than me (I think you said you were a lawyer), but I still have to disagree on the Apple thing.
It just has to be against some law, somewhere, when Apple puts a legitimate company out of business just so they can maintain their 100% market share and total monopoly on the industry.
If Psystar buys parts legitimately, buys software legitimately, and builds legitimate computers, Apple should not be allowed to stop them. The only thing Apple should be able to do is refuse to sell them the OS (which, again, Microsoft got smacked down for even threatening to stop selling their OS to companies it didn't like).
I haven't looked in a while, but I'm pretty sure Apple has pretty close to as much money as Microsoft these days. So their actions should be treated the same. We can be pretty certain that if Microsoft put some company out of business for not buying their hardware directly from Microsoft, they would have the feds crawling all over them.
Apple's actions are just unbelievable to me. Google should go on a major ad campaign that only exposes Apple's actions. Do it politician style, lol. They are operating under a business model that basically says, "Rather than put out the best product, we'll just put out average stuff and market the heck out of it. When the public figures out that it's just average stuff and other companies have better stuff, we'll just try to put them out of business instead of trying to make a better product." That's the only explanation for Apple shutting down Psystar. And that just screams monopoly, and aggressive actions being taken to maintain that monopoly.
Of course, Apple's next move would be to pull their OS off the open market, so the courts would have to force Apple to sell their OS seperate of any hardware (just like they forced MS to start selling a cheaper version of theirs without IE and Windows Media Player).
Fair is fair. Apple is no longer the little guy. They just effectively put a little guy out of business. And once they start doing that, they can no longer be considered a little guy.
If we're talking about computers running Mac OS, Apple has a clear monopoly. If we're talking about all computers- do we include smartphones and MP3 players? Technically, they are computers too...
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You know, it all boils down to how the market is defined. Mac-compatible computers? All computers? I'd guess it would be Personal Computers. So that would include Window-compatible computers too.
Predatory conduct isn't always illegal. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. I personally believe that Apple can do what it's doing with the software licensing, because it's their software and they don't have monopoly power in the PC Market. Do I think it's lame? Yeah, I kinda do. So what if some hardware vendor wants to bundle Mac software with hardware, where they've purchased licenses to the software? Mac should be happy that their name is getting put out there by another company.