Apple crushed Psystar in court; the ruling reported on November 14 stated Psystar had no right to hack about with Mac OS X and sell Mac clones.

Oddly, commentators are saying this is a bad thing. PC World called it a ‘hollow victory’, providing all the usual garbage arguments like “what if [insert car company] only let me [park in certain places/drive on certain roads]?”, ignoring the fact that with Apple, the entire unit—hardware and software—is the product. (And, car-argument fans, with Intel Macs you get your own roads and can also drive on everyone else’s.) Boxed copies of Mac OS X are to enable people to update existing Apple products. And since other platforms and PCs exist, Apple in itself isn’t a monopoly.

The main argument rearing its ugly head, though, is that Apple is stupid in restricting its OS to Apple hardware alone. It could, some say, have huge market-share if only Apple allowed its software to appear on every PC around, or even if it just licensed to choice vendors such as Dell.

This is bull. Apple is, despite what some people seem to think, primarily a hardware company, and it makes the bulk of its money from relatively high-end kit. If Mac OS X could be run on cheap hardware, that wouldn’t increase its market-share—it would just eat into Apple’s profits. This already happened once, during Apple’s disastrous experiment with Mac clones in the 1990s. And lower profits for Apple leads to less R&D and weaker products—a vicious cycle that would neither benefit Apple nor the industry as a whole.

Furthermore, Apple runs a relatively tight ship, and that’s because it deals with the entire package itself. If Mac OS X had to officially run on a huge number of additional pieces of hardware, problems would hugely escalate, and the platform’s stability—much of what makes it so appealing in the first place—would be gone.

Ultimately, Apple cares about profits. Sure, it doesn’t want its market-share to plummet, but then that’s not happening. Even in these dark financial days, Apple’s share is (very) slowly rising. And even with its small market-share, Apple consistently outperforms the competition; but it’s a fallacy to believe Apple would perform better if it ditched its lucrative hardware in favour of cheap Dell laptops running Mac OS X.