Apple wasn’t always opposed to Mac clones. For a brief period in the 1990s – when Steve Jobs was still exiled from Apple – Apple CEO Michael Spindler licensed the Mac operating system to several manufacturers: Power Computing, Motorola, Umax, APS, Radius and DayStar. When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, one of the first items on his agenda was to destroy the clone program and eliminate these cheaper alternatives to Apple’s goods.
But in 2006, Apple opened itself up to attack again (knowingly or not) when it ditched its own Power PC processors in favor of Intel’s more power-efficient CPUs. Because Apple then had to code OS X to run on Intel processors, it opened a door for hackers: They could modify the operating system code to run on any Intel-powered, non-Mac machine.
The Intel switch gave birth to an underground community of hackers dubbed OSX86, who anonymously contribute to a wiki that details the techniques required to get the Mac OS to work on other Intel machines. The OSX86 community is what made Psystar and all the aforementioned companies possible, and it’s also what enables people to install Mac OS X on a netbook, a popular hack.
“People were talking about Apple coming out with a laptop under $800 for the first time, and someone already made one and it’s a [hacked] netbook,” said Brad Linder, blogger of Liliputing.
Apple’s on-going court case (with Psystar especially) are critical for the future of OS X.