You know, I'm inclined to lean towards what inovica was saying. We do all know Psystar now. I wouldn't be surprised if this is all just a well executed marketing plan by psystar.
The upside: Hundreds of thousands of curious people visit their site to see the company that's standing up to Apple. They may even buy the system to get OS X before it's taken off of the market. The company may even do some damage to Apple's PR by bringing the high prices and 1-1 comparisons to the attention of a lot of people.
The downside: Apple tells them that they can't offer this computer any more. There are some other negligible downsides like the cost of removing the product or if Apple sues then they might have to do some "reverse advertising" because of a court order.
I doubt that this company is going to go through an expensive and lengthy battle with Apple over this.
So in the end, I think that Psystar either has a brilliant marketing plan, or just got lucky by all of the coverage.
I think apple has a vary strong case. EX: Faulty ram is frequently causes systems to crash so Psystar's cheep hardware would damage the perception of OS X's quality. Which harms apples brand.
I'm not saying that Apple doesn't have a case, but I think the approach you're suggesting is a bit dicey.
If Apple were afraid of having cheap RAM used in their systems, why would they allow end-user-upgradable RAM compatible with third-party standards in their own systems?
Another possible line of attack is that the retail versions of OS X are only upgrade versions for systems that already have OS X, so they don't cover the real cost of the produce.
I am not suggesting that they only use one line of attack. My point that even if the EULA is not valid and the right of first sale let's the company install OS X on custom systems Apple can still bring up other forms of "Harm" to stop them.
As to the ram issue they could say the type of user who would upgrade RAM would link a string of crashes to the RAM they added vs. assuming OS X is just as crappy as Vista. However, a new user given a system with bad ram is more likely to blame the OS than the hardware. So even if it's ok for them to build systems for internal use they can't sell systems to the public and say it's running OS X. (And even if it's identical HW the apple support network is better able to handle issues which would otherwise harm the OS X brand etc etc)
I do not see anything particularly cheap in what they are selling. I have three PCs assembled from "cheap" components that run fine for over 8 years.
I haven't seen recent Apple products, but the original iMac
was a piece of overpriced cheap junk. In addition to the bad hardware it had a horrible OS (8.5) that constantly froze (even Win 98 was far more stable).
Why am I telling this? Because also in those days there were legions of Mac users who would tell you about the mythical superiority of Apple products.
I do not know about US law, but I'm pretty sure that in Europe Apple would not have a chance in court with this.
The upside: Hundreds of thousands of curious people visit their site to see the company that's standing up to Apple. They may even buy the system to get OS X before it's taken off of the market. The company may even do some damage to Apple's PR by bringing the high prices and 1-1 comparisons to the attention of a lot of people.
The downside: Apple tells them that they can't offer this computer any more. There are some other negligible downsides like the cost of removing the product or if Apple sues then they might have to do some "reverse advertising" because of a court order.
I doubt that this company is going to go through an expensive and lengthy battle with Apple over this.
So in the end, I think that Psystar either has a brilliant marketing plan, or just got lucky by all of the coverage.