Sometimes there just seem to be voids that can’t be bridged, deep divides that separate people from one another for geographical or ideological reasons. Sometimes the ugliest ones happen closest to our homes or workplaces.

I’m speaking, of course, of Apple vs. PC. Deep divisions often occur on these lines, but I can’t help but notice how xenophobic the Cupertino Crew has become. The Psystar saga refuses to go away. And now, reports have surfaced that the next version of the Snow Leopard Mac OS 10.6.2 will cause a hackintosh to stop working. And just go ahead and try to sync a Palm Pre to iTunes.

Part of the upgrade appears to be aimed at not allowing the OS to function on hardware running Intel Atom processors. Huh? What hugely popular, quickly growing segment of consumer hardware tends to run an Intel Atom processor where Apple has zero presence?

Oh, right: netbooks, those inexpensive, portable and highly popular notebooks that Steve Jobs and Apple can’t quite seem to build without making it into a “piece of junk.”

Well, turns out that some customers really enjoy turning netbooks into Hackintoshes and loading OS X onto the hardware.

No more! Rather than letting its OS run on a PC, Apple is just going to try and spike the market. Somewhat ironically, Cupertino’s move to suppress comes a few months after Microsoft and Intel hatched a scheme to limit the size of netbooks and not allow Windows 7 to run on the hardware.

Both companies, of course, have now changed courses.

But Apple presses on, closing ranks and damming the torpedoes.

Now, I realize Apple doesn’t really like to play nice with people who impede on its gated community, but there appears to a something of a customer demand for OS X on netbooks. There also seems to be demand for netbooks (and that’s putting it lightly). Steve Jobs and Apple have made it pretty clear they won’t develop the hardware.

But what if the company developed an OS specifically designed to run on Intel Atom processors and let other hardware makers like Acer, Dell et al build the hardware? There would be no loss or potential loss on hardware sales and Apple could continue to extend its branches further out into the consumer market.