Bad news for people who installed Mac’s Leopard operating system on a netbook – according to Wired, the latest update for Leopard will block the OS from being used on Intel Atom devices.

At present Apple doesn’t offer a low cost netbook, which means that anyone who wants to install the operating system on a portable device has had to resort to some tinkering and trickery.

Certain things may not work, like wifi, ethernet or sound cards – a pretty big deal to some people.There are plenty of websites offering instructions on how to install OS X on an existing netbook; however, it seems to violate the EULA, regardless of whether it’s a legally bought copy or not, and Apple probably doesn’t like that too much.

So it seems Apple has taken matters in hand by preventing machines with Atom processors from running 10.6.2. The news comes via Wired’s Gadget Lab, which credits a hacker for the report.

The question is, why is Apple so determined to keep a tight grip on its devices? If the software was pirated, it would be understandable. But if someone buys a legitimate copy of OS X, shouldn’t they be allowed to run it on whatever machine they deem necessary?