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. Apple has sued, after several months of laying low, the Mac clone maker, PsyStar. The suit was filed July 3 in U.S. District Court in Northern California.

Apple alleges copyright and software licensing violations. 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 on a non-Apple machine.

The Miami, Florida PC maker PsyStar started shipping Mac clones called OpenMac back in April. The machines cost $400 and boasted 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 was packed in an Asus TM-211 white computer case.

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

Subsequently, machine was renamed Open Computer, presumably after Apple's legal onslaught. 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 had to install Leopard yourself.

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.