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Apple's recent set of financial results is nothing short of spectacular. Increases in earnings and revenue were 36% and 43% higher than the same period last year, respectively. For any company that's impressive. They're the kind of figures you might expect from a start-up in its first few years at a time of benign economic conditions. But for a 30-year-old business, shipping, in the case of the Mac, essentially the same set of products it has done for the past 20 years, during a period of huge economic uncertainty, they almost defy comprehension.

I say almost because there is one simple explanation for the stellar figures: the growth in the popularity of the Mac. You don't need to look too closely at the numbers to see that it's Mac sales that are at the heart of the increased earnings. iPod sales are relatively flat, despite the introduction of the touch and classic, and a new version of the nano last year. It seems as though, finally, the appetite of the world's music fans for Apple's portable music players has been sated. It will take something pretty spectacular to re-ignite it. The Mac, however, is a very different story.

Quarter after quarter, the company reports double-digit growth in Mac sales. It can't open retail stores fast enough to sell them. And, of course, its not just the numbers. Everyone from the BBC and The Guardian, to, it seems, every blogger on the planet, reports every Apple announcement. Every week we read stories of people who would never have dreamt of using a Mac, making the switch to Mac OS X.

There are numerous

The rise in Mac sales brings with it a number of benefits for we Mac users. It means websites and online services that were once sniffy about supporting the Mac now take it more seriously. Peripheral manufacturers for whom Mac support was either a necessary, but costly, evil or who ignored the Mac entirely, now see it as a valuable market for their products. And many developers have discovered how much fun (sometimes) it can be developing for the Mac and have either added Mac support or switched to the Mac entirely.

There are downsides, though. Mac OS X has popped up on the radar of hackers and malware writers, and while we've yet to see a serious threat of the kind Windows users are regularly exposed to, it really is only a matter of time. And, of course, that unavoidable inner smugness that comes from being the only one in our peer group who uses a Mac is lost when everyone else is using one.

However, no matter how many Macs Apple sells there will always be a significant number of computer users for whom the Mac is either too expensive, too inflexible, or just doesn't quite do what they need it to do. For many of this group, a Mac tower that can be upgraded as easily as the Mac Pro and has all the inputs and outputs of Apple's professional desktop machine, but which costs somewhere between a Mac mini and an iMac could be the ideal machine.

It's this group that Psystar has apparently attempted to appeal to with its much hyped, but so far non-existent, Mac clone. Assuming for a moment that Psystar intended building and selling these machines, the company's chutzpah is almost as admirable as its ability to spot a fairly large gap in a rapidly growing market. Less admirable is its inability to understand the end-user licence agreement for Mac OS X, which clearly forbids its installation on non-Apple hardware.