I found the same pricing in Apple's other lines. After decades of charging a premium for its hardware, Apple now prices its computers pretty much where mainstream Windows PC makers price similarly configured machines.
What differentiates Apple is that it doesn't play in the low end of the market. Most consumer desktop PCs sell for $800 or less. That's pretty much where Macs start. But there is no technical barrier to running the Mac OS on a low-cost PC with enough horsepower to handle it.
Aside from potential compatibility and driver issues that could make the OpenPC a better option for experienced users than novices, the main problem with running Leopard on a non-Mac is that Apple says you can't do it.
That prohibition is part of the 50,000-word End User License Agreement (EULA) that you say you've read when you click on a box somewhere during the installation process.
In most cases, experts say, these agreements aren't worth the electrons they're written on. However, when you challenge someone who can afford as many lawyers as Apple can hire, it doesn't matter whether you're right, but whether you can prove it before you go belly up. That's been enough to scare off most Apple challengers for the past decade or so.
Apple did flirt with outside hardware makers in the 1990s, when the company was going through a rough patch and licensed its OS to a handful of PC makers working with the PowerPC processor. These guys made perfectly good Mac clones and sold them much cheaper than Apple's machines, which didn't do much for Apple's bottom line.
When Jobs rejoined the outfit in 1997, he immediately put a stop to that - and Apple's profits soared. When you have a loyal fan base that is willing to pay a premium for your product, why would you let other people sell it cheaper?
But what happens now that anyone, theoretically, can make a PC that runs the Mac OS? Psystar - which has a going IT support business - argues that it has purchased Leopard legitimately, and that Apple's insistence on running the OS on its hardware violates U.S. antitrust laws.
Psystar does have a precedent in its favor, a 1984 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that a software publisher can't require you to run an operating system on a specific type of hardware. The Supreme Court refused to review the case.
