Psystar claims Apple asking for non-existent, redundant info

Mac clone maker Psystar has shot back at accusations that it was withholding important information in Apple's lawsuit against it, arguing that it's being asked to invent documents that don't exist or which are no longer necessary.

Filed earlier this week, the response letter rejects out of hand Apple's complaints that Psystar hasn't produced formal financial statements indicating its worth. Instead, it contends that many of the documents for balance, profit-and-loss, or other characteristics of its finances simply don't (and don't need to) exist.

The Florida PC assembler insists that has never produced any monthly, quarterly or yearly statements and rebuffs Apple's notion that drafts exist of a financial projection meant to garner early funding; although a final document was made for the venture capitalists who made the investment, Psystar claims that it never made long-term backups of the work-in-progress documents. Psystar chief Rudy Pedraza is already on record as having said this, the defense attorneys say.

Further going on the defensive, the company adds that it has produced statements, invoices and other documents whenever Apple has requested them and they were available. However, it adds that "some documents" were lost when Psystar moved to its current workspace and doesn't say what these might have been. The company also positions itself as more efficient than Apple and says that it doesn't create paper copies from electronic documents when they don't have a reason to be.

Accordingly, the clone designer says it has done all it can to follow federal rules and goes so far as to imply that Apple is trying to bully it out of court despite Psystar's attempts to follow the letter of the law.

"Unlike Apple, Psystar is a small start-up company with limited resources," the response letter reads. "Psystar has, due to Apple's discovery tactics, focused much of those resources on litigation... because Apple wants a document to exist does not make it so."

In providing the response, the fledgling company is fighting a battle of survival just to survive the discovery phase, where both parties in the case need to collect as much legally allowable evidence as possible ahead of the formal trial due to start in November. A successful claim by Apple of obstruction could derail Psystar's defense before it ever has an opportunity to present its case in court.