Apple to Psystar: See you in court

Fellow ZDNet blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes broke the story that Apple has finally had it up to here with the shenanigans of Mac cloner Psystar. By shenanigans I'm referring to the Florida company's practice of shipping its US$399 Intel clones with Mac OS 10.5 Leopard pre-installed in direct violation of Apple's End User License Agreement (EULA).

Psystar has been shipping their wonderful cloned Macs (a.k.a. Hackintoshes) since April 2008 and I've been using one ever since – and it's performed well. Click on the Psystar category to read more of my previous coverage.

A report by News.com's Ina Fried reveals that the suit was filed July 3 in U.S. District Court in Northern California but the complaint itself is not available. An Apple representative told Fried that "We take it very seriously when we believe people have stolen our intellectual property." Psystar has yet to comment, but clearly must have been expecting some sort of action eventually.

The real question is why Apple waited three months to file suit. Personally I think that they had their hands full with the iPhone 3G announcement and wanted to get that out of the way first.

What's your theory?