A yet unknown company called PsyStar has been widely exposed to the media this week since it started advertising an unofficial Mac clone offering on its web site. But all this could turn into the biggest vapor announcement of the year.

The company says it offers PCs under the "OpenComputer" brand which are fully compatible with Mac OS X and actually can be shipped with it. They offer dual Core Intel CPU and integrated graphics at the entry price of $399, or even less than the similarly configured Mac mini which costs $599.

A Pro version called Open Pro has also been added a few hours after the first product was advertised, the Pro version can include Quad-Core chips and high end graphics for less than a Mac Pro.

Everybody was expecting Apple to react since day one (or on Monday), but nothing happened, Apple stayed mum and the Psystar doesn't appear to have had problems with Apple's lawyers. The company's CEO even claimed in an interview [1] with InformationWeek that there's nothing illegal in their offering.

If we look on their web site without digging more, Psystar is mainly a network and storage solutions provider which apparently just added a Mac clones offering.

But, doesn't all this sound suspicious, or too good to be true? Yes! Charles Arthur, who writes on his blog for the Guardian has taken a more in-depth look [2] at the company. He first noticed that, though the domain psystar.com had been registered early this decade, it started being used only this week!

He also noticed that there were no Google results on the "PsyStar" before all this buzz about the company starts and that the Miami (claimed headquarters of the company) Chamber of Commerces has never heard of them. He even called the company and asked quite embarrassing questions like "Why was there nothing about you on the Internet before?"

The company's answers to those embarrassing questions were pretty vague: "We're a small IT company, doing solutions anywhere from small office networks to enterprise-level networks [...] We were a local company with little to no presence on the web".

Time will tell if this company is serious or if it just wants to get known a little (because they must think even bad advertising is still advertising). We can still hope all their claimings are true. In caae it's yet another joke, one can hope other companies will pick the idea and do that for real!