The company, which sells low-cost knockoffs of Apple's pricey Macs, is offering free CPU, memory, and hard drive upgrades on a number of its models. It's also slashing prices. As of Monday morning, Psystar.com was pitching a fully configured Mac clone, featuring the OS X "Leopard" operating system pre-installed and a dual-core CPU, for just $554.
Apple sued Psystar for copyright violation in July, alleging that Psystar's Mac clones infringe its copyrights.
A judge last month rejected Psystar's claim, filed in a countersuit, that the Mac OS represents a discrete computer market unfairly dominated by Steve Jobs' company.
Psystar's countersuit claimed that Apple's control over the market for its own products violates Sherman antitrust rules and other U.S. laws. A Psystar victory could have paved the way for other PC makers, including big vendors like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, to enter the Mac OS market and offer alternatives to Microsoft Windows PCs.
Psystar isn't depending completely on the Mac OS market. The system integrator recently introduced a Linux-based personal computer that sells for just $299.
Psystar's OpenLite system ships with the Ubuntu Linux desktop pre-installed, running on a 1.8-GHz Intel Celeron chip with integrated graphics support.
Upgrading to a dual-core Pentium chip costs an additional $40.
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