Doesn't your statement implicitly assume that the retail price of OS X today is the same as what Apple would set if they were selling it for generic X86 machines? I doubt they would sell it for $129.
Well, let me dispose of all irony then and simply state: "pirates" do not pay full retail. That was actually the claim that I was addressing.
Now let me take up what you were interested in. One clarification: I am not aware that Apple would be obligated in any way, shape or form to support "generic X86 machines". However, they do have an obligation to support the particular X86 machines that they sell, and as the category "X86 machine" suggests, there is considerable genericity there right from the start.
Further genericity is imposed by the fact (blithely ignored by all-too-many users of OSX) that we are talking about yet another Unix distribution, with an open-source foundation. I think that people underestimate, rather dramatically, just how much of the crucial work was done for Apple, for free, by the software community. Fortunately, those within Apple are not so ignorant of this fact, and thus, so far, Apple has by and large been playing nice (in sharp contrast to, for example, Microsoft).
Apple may, in the future, choose to charge a different amount for their operating system; in all likelihood, Psystar would change the price accordingly, but in any case, there is nothing to indicate that they would "pirate" the operating system.
If anyone has any indication to the contrary, please let us know--I'm sure we are all interested to hear about it.
Regarding the so-called "true cost" of OSX: what fantasy are people entertaining in that regard? I have no expertise in the matter of running a software company, but if someone told me that I had to design, code and maintain a user-friendliest GUI for a stable Unix operating system, along with drivers for a fairly restricted list of hardware items of reasonably hight quality, then I would hope to be able to do it with a staff of about 100 coders at a salary of about $100,000-200,000 each (please don't flame me for hiring too many coders--I am trying to make an estimate that errs on the side of higher costs). So the first million copies of the OS sold per year, more or less, would cover that cost; put another, what, million dollars or two for their computers...
So given that there are hundreds of millions of computers out there capable of running that great operating system, and a deplorable alternative trumpeted night and day as "the only alternative", well, I would expect this to be a pretty easy path to profit.
But like I said, I have no personal expertise on the matter. There are other expenses besides the coders (e.g. those test sessions where newbie-like reactions are gauged). Maybe the company would go bust--but I suspect that there would be plenty of well-heeled investors willing to take up the challenge in the expectation of it turning it out otherwise.
Of course, if in the pursuit of even fatter profits, that company were to price the OS much higher than $129, then unfortunately that would encourage people to share a single copy even more, and the decrease in volume may well cause an actual decrease in profit in comparison to the above scenario.
There are advantages in playing nice, and so far, Apple has seen this (as opposed to their history before the return of Steve Jobs). What they have not seen yet--and maybe from where they sit, this is either invisible or clearly unattainable--is the benefit from owning the right to distribute an operating system (with a GUI of their own making!) that can displace any competing product from Microsoft with relative ease, at least among those consumers that are free to make that choice. It sounds like a huge win to me, but so far they have not jumped on that bandwagon.
We'll see what the future brings. By the year 2010, we should have some very interesting information to consider, as I expect by then to see some very enticing offers from the Ubuntu community as well. Thanks to OSX, one seemingly immortal myth has had the proverbial stake driven through its heart: that Unix is too complicated to ever succeed as an operating system for the "typical" computer user. We'll see what other myths are kicking the bucket by then.
