Psystar’s sales: a mere 768 computers sold with Mac OS X

It turns out that all of Apple’s efforts to stop Psystar may not have been worth it. In 2008, The Florida-based computer maker told venture capitalists it would sell anywhere from 70,000 to 130,000 computers in 2009, according to ComputerWorld:

Under its conservative projections, Psystar told investors it would sell 70,000 computers in 2009, 470,000 systems in 2010 and 1.45 million machines in 2011. The firm’s aggressive growth model, however, put those numbers at 130,000, 1.87 million and 12 million during 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively.

Conservative or aggressive, those are some bad projections. To compare Apple’s numbers, Apple sold about 10 million Macs in the 2009 fiscal year, the 12-month span that ended September 30, 2009.

ComputerWorld also reports that Apple hired an economist to analyze Psystar’s business records to find how much they should be paying for Apple’s copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when it installed Leopard on Intel-based desktops. With fewer than 1,000 machines with Mac OS X pre-installed discovered, this can’t have amounted to large damages to Apple. After digging through invoices, purchase orders and other documents, Dr. Matthew Lynde, who works as an economics consultant for Cornerstone Research, was able to pinpoint only 768 sales of machines with Mac OS X pre-installed. “Psystar has not challenged my analysis of its financial records,” Lynde added.

Read [ComputerWorld]