There’s a class of consumer that wants something they know they cannot have. For some of those people, a Macintosh computer not made by Apple has long been a desired goal.
For most of the Mac’s history, you could only really get one from Apple, if you wanted to go completely by the book. Sure, there were less-legit ways to get Apple software on off-brand hardware, and plenty of people were willing to try them. But there was a short period, roughly 36 months, when it was possible to get a licensed Mac that had the blessing of the team in Cupertino.
They called it the Mac clone era. It was Apple’s direct response to a PC market that had come to embrace open architectures—and, over time, made Apple’s own offerings seem small.
During that period, from early 1995 to late 1997, you could get legally licensed Macs from a series of startups now forgotten to history, as well as one of Apple’s own major suppliers at the time, Motorola. And it was great for bargain hunters who, for perhaps the first time in Apple’s history, had a legit way to avoid the Apple tax.
But that period ended fairly quickly, in large part thanks to the man whose fundamental aversion to clone-makers likely caused the no-clones policy in the first place: Steve Jobs.
“It was the dumbest thing in the world to let companies making crappier hardware use our operating system and cut into our sales,” Jobs told Walter Isaacson in his 2011 biography.
Apple has generally avoided giving up its golden goose because the company was built around vertical integration. If you went into a CompUSA and bought a Mac, you were buying the full package, hardware and software, made by Apple. This had benefits and downsides. Because Apple charged a premium for its devices (unlike other vertical integrators, such as Commodore and Atari), it tended to relegate the company to a smaller part of the market. On the other hand, that product was highly polished.
That meant Apple needed to be good at two wildly disparate skill sets—and protect others from stealing Apple’s software prowess for their own cheaper hardware.
While historians can point to the rise of unofficial Apple II clones in the ‘80s, and modern Apple fans can still technically build Hackintoshes on Intel hardware, Apple’s own Mac clone program came and went in just a few short years.
It was a painful lesson.
This Outbound Notebook wasn’t sold with Apple features, but allowed users to insert a Mac ROM, a component that helped Apple limit cloning. However, the ROM had to come from a genuine, working Apple computer. Chaosdruid/Wikimedia Commons
Why Apple was afraid of Mac clones
For years, companies attempted to wrangle the Mac out of Apple’s hands, corporate blessing or no. Apple, highly focused on vertical integration, used its ROM chips as a way to limit the flow of MacOS to potential clone-makers. This mostly worked, as the Mac’s operating system was far more complex and harder to reverse-engineer than the firmware used by the IBM PC.
But plenty still tried. For example, a Brazilian company named Unitron sold a direct clone of the Macintosh 512K, which fell off the market only after a Brazilian trade body intervened. Later, a company named Akkord Technology attempted to sell a reverse-engineered device called the Jonathan, but ended up attracting a police raid instead.
Somewhat more concerning for Apple’s exclusivity: Early Macs shared much of their hardware architecture with other popular machines, particularly the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, each of which received peripherals that introduced Mac software support and made it easier to work across platforms.
But despite claims that this ROM-based approach was technically legal, it’s not like any of this was explicitly allowed by Apple. At one point, Infoworld responded to a letter to the editor about this phenomenon with a curt note: “Apple continually reaffirms its intention to protect its ROM and to prevent the cloning of the Mac.”
So what was Apple OK with? Full-on conversions, which took the hardware of an existing Mac, and rejiggered its many parts into an entirely new product. There are many examples of this throughout Apple’s history—such as the ModBook, a pre-iPad Mac tablet—but the idea started with Chuck Colby.
Colby, an early PC clone-maker who was friends with Apple team members like Steve Wozniak, was already offering a portable Mac conversion called the MacColby at one of the Mac’s introductory events in 1984. (Apparently Apple CEO John Sculley bought two—but never paid for them.)
One of Colby’s later conversions, the semi-portable Walkmac, had earned a significant niche audience. A 2013 CNET piece notes that the rock band Grateful Dead and news anchor Peter Jennings were both customers, and that Apple would actually send Colby referrals.
So, why did Colby get the red-carpet treatment while other clone-makers were facing lawsuits and police raids? You still needed a Mac to do the aftermarket surgery, so Apple still got its cut. One has to wonder: Would Apple have been better off just giving Chuck Colby, or any other interested party, a license to make their own clones? After all, it’s not like Colby’s ultra-niche portables were going to compete with Apple’s experience. Right?
During the 1980s, this argument was basically a nonstarter—the company even went so far as to change its dealer policy to limit the resale of its system ROMs for non-repair purposes. But by the 1990s, things were beginning to thaw.
You can thank a firm named NuTek for the nudge. The company, like Apple, was based in Cupertino, California, and it spent years talking up its reverse-engineering plans.
“Nutek will do for Mac users what the first IBM-compatible developers did in the early 1980s: open up the market to increased innovation and competition by enabling major independent third-party manufacture,” explained Benjamin Chou, the company’s CEO, in a 1991 ComputerWorld piece.
And by 1993, it had built a “good enough” analogue of the Mac that could run most, but not all, Mac programs. “We’ve tested the top 15 software applications and 13 of those worked,” Chou told InfoWorld, an impressive boast until you hear the non-working apps are Microsoft Works and Excel.
It failed to make a splash, but NuTek’s efforts nonetheless exposed a thaw in Apple’s thinking. A 1991 MacWorld piece on NuTek’s reverse engineering attempt quoted Apple Chief Operating Officer Michael Spindler as saying, “It is not a question of whether Apple will license its operating system, but how it will do this.”
Meanwhile, Windows was finally making inroads in the market, and Apple was ready to bend.
The moment Apple changed its mind about clones
There was a time when it looked like MacOS was about to become a Novell product. Really. In 1992, Apple held very serious talks with the networking software provider about selling, and it almost happened. ThenMichael Spindler became Apple’s CEO in 1993 and killed the Novell experiment, but not the idea of licensing MacOS. It just needed the right partner.
It found one with Stephen Kahng’s Power Computing. Kahng, a veteran of the clone wars, first made waves in the PC market with the clone-maker Leading Edge, and he wanted to repeat that feat with the Mac. And his new firm, Power Computing, was offering an inroad for Apple to potentially score similar success.
And so, in the waning days of 1994, just before the annual MacWorld conference, the news hit the wires: Apple was getting an authorized clone-maker. It turns out that the key was just to wait for the right CEO to take over, then ask nicely.
Though the idea may have looked rosy at first, some saw some dark clouds over the whole thing. Famed tech columnist John C. Dvorak suggested that Kahng was more dangerous than he seemed. “Apple is not going to know what hit them,” he told The New York Times.
And there were other signs that Apple was starting to lose its identity. A PC Magazine analysis from early 1995 perhaps put the biggest frowny-face on the story:
Apple’s decision to create a clone market may or may not be successful, but it didn’t really have a choice. At the recent MacWorld conference, one of the most popular technical seminars was given by Microsoft. It covered how Mac programmers can learn to write Windows applications.
One can see why Apple might have been attracted to this model, in retrospect. The company was a bit lost in the market at the time, and needed a strategy to expand its shrinking base of users.
But the clone market did not expand its base. Instead, it invited a price war.
A PowerCenter Pro 210, a Macintosh clone manufactured by Power Computing Corporation.Angelgreat/Wikimedia Commons
Why licensed Mac clones didn’t work
The best time for Apple to introduce a clone program was probably a decade earlier, in 1985 or 1986. At the time, people like Chuck Colby were inventing new kinds of Macs that didn’t directly compete with what Apple was making. Furthermore, the concept of a Mac was new, just as desred for its form factor as its software.
In hindsight, it’s clear that 1995 wasn’t a good time to do so. The decision put a mirror against Apple’s own offerings, which attempted to hit every possible market segment—47 different device variants that year alone, per EveryMac.
This didn’t reflect well on Apple—and companies like Power Computing exploited that to offer cheaper hardware. The company’s Power 100, for example, scored basically identical performance to the Macintosh 8100/100, while cutting more than US $1,000 off the Apple product’s $4,400 price tag. Meanwhile, other machines, such as the DayStar Genesis MP, outpaced Apple’s own ability to hit the high end.
Both of these machines, in their own ways, hit at a key problem with Apple’s mid-’90s industrial design. Before the iMac revolutionized Apple computers upon its 1998 release, Macs simply didn’t have enough of a “wow factor” driving the industrial design. It made the Mac about the software, not the hardware.
Within a year or two, it was clear that Apple had begun to undermine its own bottom line. When Chuck Colby put a Mac motherboard in a new chassis, Apple kept its high margins. But Power Computing’s beige boxes ate into Apple’s market share, and the MacOS-makers also got a far smaller cut.
There likely was a magic point at which Power Computing’s scale would have made up for the loss in hardware revenue. But in the era of Windows 95, Apple needed a partner that would go toe-to-toe with Packard Bell. Instead, these cut-rate Macs only attracted the already converted, undercutting Apple along the way.
“I would guess that somewhere around 99 percent of their sales went to the existing customer base,” then-CFO Fred Anderson told Wired in 1997.
The company only figured this part out after Steve Jobs returned to the fold.
Apple’s retreat from cloning
The course correction got messy: Jobs, in the midst of trying to fix this situation in his overly passionate way, might have harmed the evolution of the PowerPC chip, for example. A 1998 piece from the Wall Street Journal notes that Jobs’ tough negotiations over clones damaged its relationship with Motorola, its primary CPU supplier, to the point the company pledged it would no longer go the extra mile for Apple.
“They will be just another customer,” a Motorola employee told the paper.
Power Computing—which had an apparent $500 million in revenue in 1996 alone—got a somewhat softer landing, though not without its share of drama. Apple had pushed the company to agree to a new licensing deal even before Jobs took over as CEO, and once he did, it was clear the companies would not see eye to eye. The company’s then-president, Joel Kocher, attempted to take the battle to MacWorld, where he forced a public confrontation over the issue. The board disagreed with Kocher’s actions, Kocher quit, and ultimately the company sold most of its assets to Apple for $100 million, effectively killing the market entirely.
The only clone-maker that Apple seemed willing to play ball with was the company UMAX. The reason? Its SuperMac line had figured out how to hit the low-end market, an area Apple has famously struggled to hit. Apple wanted UMAX to focus on the sub-$1,000 market, especially in parts of the world where Apple lacks a foothold. But UMAX didn’t want the low-end if it couldn’t keep a foothold in the more lucrative high end, and it chose to dip out on its own.
The situation highlighted the ultimate problems with cloning—a loss of control, and a lack of alignment between licensor and licensee.
Apple restricted the licenses, making these System 7 clones, for the most part, restricted from (legally) upgrading to Mac OS 8. It did the trick—and starved the clone-makers out.
The one time Steve Jobs flirted with a Mac clone
That would be the end of the Apple clone story, except for one dangling thread: Steve Jobs once attempted to make an exception to his aversion to clones.In the early 2000s, Jobs pitched Sony on the idea of putting Mac OS X on its VAIO desktops and laptops, essentially because he felt it was the only product line that matched what Apple was doing from a visual standpoint.
Jobs looked up to Sony and its cofounder Morita Akio, even offering a eulogy for Akio after his passing. (Nippon, upon Jobs’ passing, called the Apple founder’s appreciation for the country and its companies “a reciprocal love affair.”) But Sony had already done the work with Windows, so it wasn’t to be.
On Sony’s part, it sounds like the kind of prudent decision Jobs made when he killed the clones a few years earlier.
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