Posted on 08/29/2008 1:02:36 PM PDT by astyanax
There *used* to be Mac clones, authorized ones even.
Quality ranged from good to *awful* and it almost killed Apple.
Late 80’s if I recall correctly?
When MSWin 3.x was taking off.
Was it just bad timing?
I am scared that you think the claim that a company can have a monopoly on the rights to its own products is a legally justifiable claim.
Someone had better tell RIM that they have a monopoly on the Blackberry.
Nope, 90s. Win 9x era.
Here’s the thing - if Apple were to just sell the OS and not hardware (which they really can’t, if they allow cloning/commercial use of OS X on regular PC hardware - history says that few will buy it), OS X would have to cost *at least* $400 or more just to cover development costs.
Who’s going to buy a $400 operating system for their home computer????
Emulators
Before true clones were available, the Atari ST could be converted into a Mac by adding the third-party Spectre GCR emulator, which required that the user purchase a set of Mac ROMs. The Amiga could also be converted into a Mac with similar emulators.[citation needed]
Since Apple Computer never manufactured a 68060-based Mac, the fastest way to run native 68000 Mac OS applications on real hardware was to run it on an Atari or Amiga with a 68060 upgrade.
There was also a software emulator for x86 platforms running DOS/Windows and Linux called Executor, from ARDI. ARDI reversed engineering the Mac ROM and build a 68000 cpu emulator, enabling Executor run many (but not all) Macintosh software, from system 5 to system 7 with good speed.
The migration from 68000 to PowerPC and the difficulties to emulate a PowerPC in x86 platforms killed the continuity of the project.
The first Macintosh clones
Apple's strategy of suppressing clone development was successful. From 1986 to 1991, several manufacturers created Macintosh clones, including the portable Outbound; however, in order to do so legally, they had to obtain official ROMs by purchasing one of Apple's Macintosh computers, remove the required parts from the donor, and then install those parts in the clone's case. This resulted in very expensive, relatively unpopular clones.
Apple could safely say that its share of the Macintosh computer market was not in danger and even granted value-added reseller status to the creator of the Colby Dynamac portable clone.
A Brazilian company called Unitron is thought to have developed a Macintosh clone with 512KB of RAM and some custom chips made by National Semiconductor.[5] The clone was not widely sold because Apple pressed the American government to create commercial sanctions preventing international sales of this computer. To this day it remains a mystery whether the Unitron Mac's ROMs were reverse-engineered or merely copied.[6]
That’s not the clones we’re talking about. I’m talking about the authorized clones, made 95-97.
Nice of you to leave out the Wiki URL, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Official_Macintosh_clone_program
Ahh, early to mid 90’s, upgrading from 3.1 to 95.
And having a dual boot with dos 5 and 6 and finally 6.22.
What a scam that was, but it put MS everywhere.
Apple HAD to do something if they wanted to stick around.
They did and they did.
Yes, but cloning wasn’t it. All cloning did was destroy Apple hardware sales. The only reason Apple’s still around is OS X, the iMac, and the genius of Jobs and Jonathan Ives.
And the board, for realizing that they had dug a deep, deep hole by 1997 and finally ceasing to dig.
Oh, so you like having people say “FreeRepublic users can’t post our material because they violate our terms of service?” We have a nice long list of sites that won’t let us post their stuff because (among other reasons) of people like you. Great going!
Also, it’s bad scholarship to steal material and publish it elsewhere without citing the source. Considered plagiarism, it is.
Mommy, please do my work for me!
Be rude to someone else
QC is one issue, but not the major one. When Apple licensed clones in the mid-’90s, they were selective enough about the companies and kept a tight enough reign on licensees that the quality was generally good; not the quality of Apple’s own offering, but not thrown-together crap.
Cloning was a misguided effort to compete with Wintel as a seller of beige-box computers. Steve killed the program when he returned to the company. Apple had hoped clones would expand the Mac into new markets; instead, the clones cannibalized sales of the Mac’s base and did little to expand it.
It didn’t work with Apple’s model, which is fundamentally different from the Wintel one — the company’s real innovations are in software, but their R&D is funded by hardware sales.
The Tao of Mac from the beginning was software and hardware designed to work together, and the business model was built around that. It is a model that has allowed Apple to thrive while several companies (including IBM with its bottomless pockets) failed to take on Microsoft as an OS vendor, and hundreds failed as beige-box PC manufacturers.
That was true for a year or so. It didn't take too long for the PowerPC in emulation to run faster than the fastest native 680x0. Daystar, for one, offered 68060 upgrades for Macs, but they never really caught on; developers had moved on to PPC, and the need for fast 680x0-native execution was a shrinking niche.
There was also a software emulator for x86 platforms running DOS/Windows and Linux called Executor, from ARDI. ARDI reversed engineering the Mac ROM and build a 68000 cpu emulator, enabling Executor run many (but not all) Macintosh software, from system 5 to system 7 with good speed.
I think Executor evolved into SheepShaver, a 680x0/PPC emulator for Mac on Mac. Since Apple didn't port Classic over to Intel (and dropped it from 10.5), it's the best way out there to run really old Mac code. I fire it up occasionally for old games when I'm feeling nostalgic.
One of my managers was nor enamored of my new Mac Plus when I fired it up at work. He said, What can that do that I can’t do. I think it was early 86.
was not
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