Why Apple allowed Official Macintosh Clones in the '90s - Retro Tech History
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 ม.ค. 2021
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What is an Apple Mac? From the Apple Mac pro to the Mac Mini to the Mac Air these are easily identifiable devices in the modern day but this wasn't always so. Today we discover why Apple allowed Officially Licensed Macintosh clones in the '90s? We're going to look at some examples from my collection and we'll explore the history behind the decisions made by Apple at the time, and why the idea came crashing to an end.
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It's good to be back, happy new year to you all! Did you own a Macintosh clone? I'd love to hear your stories.
Also be sure to check out Steve's channel for lots of Apple goodies: th-cam.com/users/mac84 - He'll be exploring the history of clones on his own channel later today.
Neil - RMC
Good to have you back, I missed my retro tech
Have you moved yet?
Thanks Neil! Excellent video, I was so glad to contribute to this. Good luck with getting all your clones up and running! FYI - Part 1 in my clone series is out now: th-cam.com/video/PMXKy5vrMJM/w-d-xo.html
Welcome back
Hi Neil, welcome to 2021; it's good to have you back. I hope you have settled in in your new den. 😄
When Steve showed that tower, I immediately came up with the perfect name for him to give it:
Mackard Bell
"A demented ghetto blaster"
Reminds me of those odd Compaq PC's they built in the late 90's with the built in speakers and usually Windows ME installed
Was I the only one expecting Neil start doing sign language the corner 😂
I was expeting him to tell more of the weather.
Tiny Neil in the corner!
@@frazzleface753 nobody puts Neil in the corner ;)
The Ponytail at 2:32 is incredible.
That's no ponytail, that's a glorious, GLORIOUS mullet! Paired with that jacket, it is the perfect "Business in front, party in back" image.
The stone walls behind the crates just gives the cave that extra class :)
Fancy!
There was also BeOS that could run on PowerPC macs.
There was talk of an acquisition by Apple around 1996, which never panned out. I don't know when the talks started with Jobs, but the writing was likely on the wall.
@@espressomatic Talks all happened around the same time, and there were two options initially: BeOS, which already ran on PowerPC but could also run on Intel, and a Microsoft offer of what amounted to the Mac interface running on top of the Windows NT kernel. Someone at Apple who was still in touch with Jobs connected him with Ellen Hancock, then-CTO of Apple, and so NeXT became an option. Be basically got ruled out because Jean Louis Gassee wanted $100m, and Apple would only pay $80m - and of course, Jobs managed to get $400m out of them.
omg that “uh-oh” I haven’t heard that in two decades
I miss those times.
Javascript was a mistake.
@@digiowl9599 For what it was meant for it, not really... pushing it into a "do anything & everything, anywhere & everywhere, all the time" thing was a HUGE mistake.
Same here! Anyone remember what it was from? I'm thinking it was an FTP client but I'm hazing over that a bit.
Never mind - icq apparently. I'm getting it confused with the 'Oh no!' sample
@@therealfodder It was ICQ but I think WS_FTP also used it as an error sound.
To be fair, when Windows 3 came out, Apple's System 6 didn't really have a better reputation for stability. ;)
Both Windows and Apples MacOS were terrible at stability. The lack of memory protection in applications really showed. I never used the pre X MacOSes but when I finally toyed around with them, I was frankly quite amazed how terrible they were, given that they were alyways praised by the Mac crows back them as being so superior to windows.
Not that windows was any good, but hey standards were low back then.
I did tech support for the Radius brand PowerMac clones and got to help Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads with his. I think I shipped him a new SCSI HDD under warranty.
Looks like you have stepped up the production value since moving to the new mega cave. Nice slow panning shots and I'm loving the small overlaid Retro man.
Never thought I'd be describing a video about Mac clones as 'absolutley badass' but here we are. Amazing job.
“We’re not comparing Apples to Apples”.... *crickets*
He did look genuinely sorry.
Needs to do like the pros do and add a laugh track for those punchy nuggets
Why Apple no longer allows Macintosh clones: everyone else was doing Apple's job better than Apple.
The textured backdrop created by the stone wall behind the set is just great! - The coloured lighting picks it out beautifully.
Thanks Mike I really enjoy it too. Today I've been building a new wall from an old factory floor and I think it looks great, this will be the new Lab backdrop. Can't wait to share it
When I moved to Round Rock, Texas in 1999, POWER COMPUTING’S headquarters building still sat there with their name on it, but abandoned by that time.
5 years ago I thought I got StarMax for cheap, but inside it was an Intel motherboard with 200 MHz Pentium MMX and 128 Mb of RAM. To make it more appealing to use, I've installed NeXTSTEP on it :D
Spectra on the Atari ST was awesome back in the day. Being able to run Mac software on a faster machine, with larger screen, for a fraction of the price was the real start of Hackintosh, or Jackintosh as some referred to it.
"I guess you could say we're not comparing apples to apples" *sigh* oh Neil... :D
I'm sorry
@@RMCRetro no you're not ;-)
Come on, we all knew it was coming, and Neil didn't let us down.
You really couldn't help that could you dad.
@@RMCRetro Sorry... Not sorry
Wasn't the main issue with the Apple clones being that they were generally better than Apples offering whilst being cheaper, quite important for the power users.
Ding.
Still the same situation, overpriced with less powerful hardware than Hackintosh
Yup lol. Apple couldn't rip people off anymore so they ended the program.
If a company intends to remain in the hardware business, then it's not really reasonable to license the crown jewels software to direct competitors
Not better. The Frankins were terrible. But nonetheless it was killing them. Steve killed that fast.
Prob the most professional setup I have seen on youtube, its like high-level TV quality, and the lighting is so well set up. Makes popular TH-camrs look amateur
That's very kind thank you! There's lots more to come :D
i just love the start menu on the motorola clone, totally ripping off the thing they meant to destroy.
My first two Macs were, in fact, clones. A Power Computing 100 was first, it was around $1799 which was far cheaper than the cheapest Macintosh model. I bought a UMAX C-500 240mhz model as a floor model at one of the few electronics chains that carried Macs, it only cost me $500. The next week Apple announced the original iMac. My UMAX C-500 was a bit tricky... I had a Voodoo 1 card that I wanted to replace, so I bought an ATI Rage 128 card for $200, got it home and installed it, and any time something graphically complex came on screen (I believe the game I was playing was Tomb Raider III) the computer would freeze up solid. Turns out the C-500 was using a modified Power Mac 7200 motherboard, which had a PCI 1.0 card slot, rather than the PCI 1.1 slots that became standard after that model. And the ATI card couldn't handle it. So I returned it, and bought a PC Voodoo 3 card and flashed the ROM to make it Mac compatible. Since the Voodoo 3 didn't officially get made for the Mac not much software took advantage of it, and the heat it generated used to keep my room toasty in the winter. I used to modify and upgrade those machines quite a lot, it was always nice to be able to get inside the case and throw in CD burners and such. I miss those days.
Why is Penn Gillette opening that computer? He could just use his magic to disassemble it.
I had the pleasure of working on a mac clone back in the day for a user. That monster speaker box in the front of that Pioneer is amazing!
I have a clone and like the fact that it is so compatible with PC devices, like a vga monitor.
Here's the breadth of my experience with the Apple ecosystem...some time like 15ish years ago iTunes began to require Quicktime and I said sod it - I'm out!
Now I have a burning desire to know about "cutie".
Hey nice to see a collab with one of my favorite channels, Mac84!
Great to have you back! Brilliant return video....and the new caves debut.
Wow, that M-Power that Steve showed off looked surprisingly like a Packard Bell, especially the power button... I wonder if the same company that designed the cases for Packard Bell, Frog, also designed the cases for APS?
I wouldn't put it past them. I believe a lot of UMAX clones used similar, or the same, cases from Dell machines. It was just another way to keep the cost down.
Strictly speaking it was just the PC bios that was reverse-engineered. The hardware (and software) was all off-the-shelf anyway.
Shut up...
Yay welcome back Neil.looking forward to more from RMC in the new cave :-)
Wonderful feelings of nostalgia. I really wanted one of these back in the day! It also made me recall the BeBox from that era, a rare piece of mid-90’s awesomeness that I’d love to see your channel cover sometime.
Watching the evolution and choices in your presentation style and production has been really really nice over the years. Here's to another year of great videos!
Just noticed that during the iconic Macintosh commercial @4:28 there is a bloke that closely resembles a shocked Steve Balmer.
Coincidence?
I miss my G3 upgraded Power Computing Clone. The chassis on those were basically an intel clone chassis and ATX PSU. In fact I used that machine in an Antec chassis for some years before I got my G4 and later G5 towers. Great video! Cheers from Las Vegas!
All G3s and G4’s are pretty close to standard ATX, just have to rearrange a few pins and join a few others. My dual G4s ran on ATX 800W supplies when the original 250W crapped out. Best mod I’ve ever done
I have fond memories of the clones. My dad bought his first Mac OS machine in 1996 which was a Computer Warehouse Manhattan clone. CW were an established Apple dealer ran big multi-page adverts in all the UK Mac magazines. They then launched their own clone range named after cities - I remember Paris being another model. The Manhattan tower was pitched as being equivalent PowerMac 8500, but in reality was a PowerMac 4400 in a tower case. One sad thing was that when the machine developed a fault only a few years into its life, the clone era had ended and CW no longer supported the hardware! It was bodge fixed by a local PC repair firm and then promptly gave up entirely just a few months later!
My university also had UMAX branded clones in 1999.
Great Video Neil. The Cave is looking great too, some quality items on that background behind you. Nice addition with the Webcam and Green Screen now, very good indeed. Hope your well.
Great video. Hope all is well at the new carve.
Welcome back, Cave Dweller!
What a great way to kick off 2021 ☺️
Nice, I like the new format for this video. Thanks!
Lovely to have you back, Neil!
Your MPC-LX200 is basically a 100MHz variant of the Mac 62/63xx series in a nicer case with an excellent integrated sound system. You can probably resurrect it by recapping the power supply (a custom Matsushita unit). You'll also want to replace the cone support rubber on the subwoofer because it's likely completely disintegrated by now.
I remember this era so well. I had a Mac Performa 6300, and my friend bought a clone, I think maybe a Umax, and it was no end of trouble.
Nice to see you settling cosily into the new cave! 👍🕹️
Very nice vid! Cool to see my buddy Steve in there as well!
Another excellent video, Neil! Cheers.
I can understand why it was not favourable financially for licensed clones. Sometimes keeping everything in house can be better.
Thanks for the memories. I do remember having an apple clone back in the day.
Just about to do a full refurb series on an LC475 so this was very interesting! Great video again!
Great video Niel.
The new studio looks great
Great episode! So many changes of tune on the clone front. Especially considering the lawsuit around the Franklin Apple II clones.
Love your channel and your videos. It´s always a pleasure for me to watch them. Yes, the "hackintosh´s" are also a very interesting story to tell.
"The Magic Sac. Turns your Atari into a Mac!" That little cartridge was extremely popular with Atari ST owners back in the day. Apple threatened their own dealers attempting to prevent them from selling MacOS ROM chips to ST owners for their Magic Sacs. But thanks to the Magic Sac, the first Mac laptop was the Atari STacy. God times. Oh, I think you forgot about the Microsoft SoftCard for the Apple II line. It included RAM and a Z80 CPU to run Digital Research's CP/M operating system on the Apple II. It was actually the most popular CP/M configuration back then. That was years before Microsoft started selling mice and other hardware. The other thing to remember about the Mac licensing agreements was that the intent was to increase the size of the Macintosh platform and attract more - and new - users who would normally buy PC compatibles. But apparently it ended up cannibalizing Apple's existing customer base more than it did attracting new customers... or at least that's what Jobs wanted everyone to believe...
I have a Power Computing / Power Center 240. It is a Mac clone that looks like an old midi tower PC. These were produced between 1995-1997. These days they are extremely rare, since most of them were thrown away.
Another great video. Really informative, thank you! How’s the new cave coming along?
Great thank you, you'll get an update video on the building of it next week and I'm taking a break from building a wall right now
Informative and utterly pointless.
The ARM transition means that I can now run Mac OS on an Archimedes, right?
You are bloody dapper and delightfully pleasing on the eye
New set looks amazing, video is very interesting
Nice video Neil. I enjoyed that, very entertaining and informative. I think there were earlier clones of apple products as well. One that springs to mind was the Orange! lol!
WOW! Action GoMac! I had that on my iMac G3 back in the OS 8 days. Loved to use Kaleidoscope too, to theme the UI.
Great Video Quite An Amazing History About The Apple Clones
Really interesting watch and I'd almost forgotten that Mac clones existed even though I lived in the US during those exciting mid-90s days! Also loving the new picture-in-picture Neil feature although it does feel like I should be seeing some sign language when watching him there.
Years ago I worked for Coulter electronics. They were developing a medical system that would run on a network of computers. They looked at PCs running the Power PC processor, which at that time had first been introduced. Motorola sold a computer that looked like a tower PC, with an ATX style motherboard, but had the PowerPC processor. The machine could be configured to run Windows NT (Microsoft briefly did support this processor), MacOS, or Linux. Coulter ran the Windows NT system on it. The cost of the Motorola PowerPC platform in this form factor was higher than a similar Intel based PC clone, so they never went with the PowerPC. They eventually scrapped the few eval units they had bought, and I claimed one of them for my own use in my office. I installed Linux on it, and it ran that quite well.
It's good to see you back Neil. I hope the office move went smoothly, I assume it did as you've started making videos again :-)
I love what the new space is allowing you to do with your production. Top drawer!
Liking the look of the new set. Very nice.
Great and very interesting video. I like the format with a bit of history then show the machines and rap it up with the conclusion. You seem to have settled in to the new cave well, I trust that the Atari ST cupboard hasn't been filled up yet😉.
I loved watching this. It was really a good review of the Apple Clone history. You should do a video on the history of OS/x.
in the first half of the video I could not concentrate on your storytelling because of the gorgeous hairstyles and glasses and clothes in the old clips :D
good video neil ! hey look at steve on the RMC ! steve does live streams that are always a treat !
I had a Power Computing PowerBase 240 when I was younger and later had a Power Tower 275 for a short time.
Nice to have you back...hard to tell you are in a new studio so nicely transitioned. I also liked your "Paul Harvey" moment of "the rest of the story" :-/ BTW, I think it's "coup" not "queue" when pronouncing Apple's home.
6:15 Hahahaha, I wasn't gonna mention it, but I was thinking exactly the same about MSX :-) glad you did mention it!
Not quite the same. Microsoft specified the hardware, but never released their own machine. When I think of Microsoft hardware back then my first thought was mice. Before every PC came with one they were one of the largest manufacturers.
I was a tech support agent back in the late 90s and thought it was wild that there were Mac clones. 🤣
Closest comouter I have is a non-clone. Motorola PowerStack 604mt. Ran the power pc 604 chip but used pci bus and ran either AIX or Windows T 3.5.1 or 4.0
I bought a Power Computing Powerwave 604|120 in 1996. It initially was a great computer. Where I ran into trouble was with upgrades. Cards like CPU upgrades and video cards like the Miro DC-30 just never worked well. I suspect that Power had tweaked the clocks on the Apple chipset to eek out a little more speed, but put things out of spec. I don't know who remembers the articles in the magazines back in the day, Power Computing generally benchmarked a little higher than Apple's systems with the same chipset. I later put a few of my cards in a blue Apple G3 tower I bought and the cards performed much better. The Powerwave got sold to a friend and I think it lived a good life with a G3 processor card I eventually got for it. Wow, I completely forgot about G3 upgrade cards. I'll have to research the manufacture...
Great video :)
The first computer my folks ever bought was a used Apple II+ in 1983. Then next one was a Motorola Starmax in ‘96 or ‘97. Can’t recall the model but it had a 603 running at 130 MHz. I loved it, but it was not quite up to the task of running some of the newer games I wanted to play at the time. So I convinced my folks to upgrade to a PowerBase 240 (and it included a modem!) a year or so later. For my folks, the Starmax was more than powerful enough to do their household tasks, so I got to load up the PowerBase with tons of games, and it became my main machine for many years afterwards. It was pretty badass.
My fav mac clone was the apple pippin system even though I never had one. The Pippin OS was just the same idea as Windows CE but with more powerful hardware running be-hide it.
Great episode.
Great video and really thought provoking. I remember thinking at the time Apple just needed to license their OS, I'd never thought that Apple is fundamentally a hardware company.
I used a few Mac clones at art college (almost the entire computer dept was Mac based for graphic design work) in about 1998/99 and they were perfectly fine. The vast majority of computers there were LC IIIs or whatever the education variant was (you got the same machine, branded as a Quadra, Low Cost or Performa depending if you were buying for the home, business or education - VERY confusing), lots of Mac Classics, Centris and so on. Even the odd Macintosh II, a few G3 all-in-ones and various PowerMacs, all tied together by Apple Network Servers. It was a sea of beige. They all got sold off to the students (and vastly overpriced) or dumped, as they shifted to G3 iMacs and B&W G3s. Of course, I was still using my Amiga 1200, so I quickly got hold of some Mac Rom images and ran a very stable Mac emulator, which made life a lot easier for transferring files.
Hi Neil, love what you did with the cave. I can't help to see that the white balance is quite off between shots. Even in the thumbnail ;)
I remember some of these things being absolute beasts. One was a quad core stupidly fast deal with an insane amount of memory.
Love to see that Pioneer working and pumping up the volume!
Interesting video, I never saw any of these clones back then. Then again I didn't see many Apple computers in the 90s UK at all!
19:32 "The CPU is soldered on the board" well at least that's Apple-ly.
I'd like to see a what-if where commodore didn't melt down and out mac'd apple during that period
The Atari ST - and not the Amiga - was the fastest Macintosh back then courtesy of the Magic Sac Macintosh hardware emulator. And thanks to it, the Atari STacy laptop was the first Macintosh laptop.
new cave is looking great
i must see the restore vid on that pioneer one and be interesting to see how well it sounds too
My first exposure to the Mac OS was as a technician repairing Power Computing Mac clones in the mid to late 90’s. Despite being clones, they still came with a repair price tag that would have made Apple proud!
One of the other reasons for Microsoft bailing out Apple, was that MS was facing some serious anti-trust legal issues. They needed Apple to survive otherwise MS risked becoming a monopoly, and faced the probability of being broken up.
That last rhetorical question (or more specifically that hackintosh part/one) is interesting, when all seems to be pointing to "no alternative OSes, last couple years for hackintosh" direction.
When Adobe, Macromedia, and other graphic software companies started coming out with Windows versions of their software the situation for Apple became dire. I worked at a printing company at the time and we considered switching to Windows PCs for graphic design when equivalent software became available. However when the new Mac clones came out we opted to buy those instead because at least we could stay in the "Apple" ecosystem. I think the clone strategy was a somewhat desperate attempt to keep the Mac market share from shrinking further. If professional graphic design software developers had completely jumped ship to Windows at that time the Mac might not have survived.
I just got a PPC Mac! Dont make me want more PPC! Im out of storage space XD
Good video, nice editing! I like the new cave!
Its nice with more Mac stuff, theirs SO much software for OS 8-9 its like a howl new world to explore.
Going on a retro mini Lan tomorrow with a Mac G4 myself so I'm totally hyped now :P
Loved this overview! And ooooh that Pioneer Powermac - wow!
Sadly the licensed Apple Mac clone-period happened smack in the middle of bad cap-era but there's always hope that the clone systems were built to withstand the test of time a little better than the original apple 68K and early powerPC macs. A lot of my original machines have severely failed due to caps and batteries over the years.
Nice historical summary of a mostly forgotten class of machines. Maybe worth noting that using modern flat screens is normally not an issue with classic color Macintoshes. You just need a simple dongle that converts Apple’s 15-pin D-sub monitor connector to the HD15 VGA standard connector.
No jokes here... but perhaps include a "hair light" on your green screen scenes to help pop you off from the background.
I don't know, the weatherman look suits him :p
And what difference it would make? Guy is bald like.... any bald guy is. Hitman level, well... almost.
Love how you had to say no joke. 😂 A rim light(aka hair light) or even a reflector would do wonders though
Great video as per usual. As I said somewhere on here before, you can get much more in-depth information from Walter Isaacson is biography of jobs which covers the clones issue extensively. I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Nails done a great job with the fundamentals of this. Thank you RMC