Apple's legion of lawyers has already hit a PC maker which offered an OS X - compatible machine at a fraction of what the greedy Cupertino company charges. First their website went down, allegedly due to a sudden surge in incoming connections (due to the publicity the generic Mac hype has generated). Then, Apple's lawyers have apparently found a provision in Leopard's quasi-illegal End User License Agreement (EULA) which Psystar has violated by preinstalling the Apple-made OS.

Days ago, the Miami, Florida PC maker PsyStar started shipping Mac clones called OpenMac. The machines cost $400 and boast a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 Processor, 2GB of DDR2 667 memory, onboard Intel GMA 950 Graphics, a 20x DVD+/-R SATA drive that is Lightscribe-capable, a 250GB 7200RPM hard drive and is capable of running unmodified OS X Leopard kernels. All is packed in an Asus TM-211 white computer case.

Now the machine was renamed Open Computer, presumably after Apple's legal onslaught. It appears that Steve Jobs & Co will not allow anybody to reveal that they are actually selling PC hardware for a price a few times more than its actual value. Psystar has said that it will face Apple in court and it does not believe that the Mac maker's EULA can stand trial. Neither do we.

There was also an option to buy the machine with Leopard preinstalled, which also gave users the actual Leopard retail box with genuine installation disc and an additional Psystar restore disc to get your OpenMac back from the dead quickly if your software breaks down. Now this option has been also canceled, following Apple's legal tricks, and you will have to install Leopard yourself.

There are options such as a powerful NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT video card for $110 (which you could also add yourself from another source) and FireWire, which is a little costly at $50, considering you can find FireWire add-on cards for like $15.

There are several Leopard hacks which make it run on non-Apple PC hardware. The so-called OSx86 hacks are already popular on the Internet. To run on a normal PC, the first thing Leopard needs is an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) hack or emulator. This means that a Leopard-compatible firmware must be installed on the motherboard or an emulator must be used. Psystar uses the EFI V8 emulator.

So what Psystar really offers is just standard PC hardware, chosen to closely match whatever Apple is putting in its machines, at a fraction of the price. In addition, the EFI emulator is provided to enable running OS X.