Apple internal music video – I Think We're a Clone Now (1994) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
This reminds me of near the end of the dotcom bubble where startups were making these kind of videos. There was one where the whole team was at a rented mansion doing a lip-sync. I wish I could find it but I think it got wiped from the internet after backlash. I remember it showed employees lounging around a pool.
Edit: a few minutes googling for that video I mentioned and I realized we may have finally hit a point where you can be forgot online. Not because the content disappears but because there is so much new content / noise that finding anything more than a few weeks old is very difficult.
It didn’t last more than a couple of years, and the deal ended pretty badly for those manufacturers. They were kind of let in the mud.
The Mac largely avoided this by having massively more complex ROMs (huge chunks of the OS, including the GUI, were implemented in ROM) which was impractical to reverse engineer. Apparently one company tried and had some limited success: https://everymac.com/systems/nutek/index.html
In the mid-90s, Apple was in serious trouble and they saw official clones as a way to expand market share and revenue. They licensed the OS and ROMs to a bunch of different companies. The result was a wide range of non-Apple Mac-compatible computers with official OS support from Apple.
Unfortunately, the idea of expanding Apple's reach through clones never really materialized. Instead, the clones cannibalized Apple's Mac business. After the return of Steve Jobs, he killed the whole program and the clones disappeared. The whole thing only lasted about two years.
I remember the DayStar Genesis MP was the dream system of that time. The highest end model, the MP 932+, had four PowerPC 604e CPUs running at 225MHz. It could hold up to 1.5GB of RAM, although buying that much RAM would, I'm sure, have cost more than the GDP of a medium-sized country at the time. The computer itself cost $6,500 in 1997. Some of the earlier DayStar systems cost up to $12,000.
I owned a PowerCenter Pro 180, from Power Computing, which was probably the most active and interesting clone maker of the era. It was a great machine for a great price and continued to be well supported by Apple OS updates well after the demise of Power Computing. My first Linux experience was on that computer, first with MkLinux (which was a wacky hybrid made by Apple, running the Linux kernel on top of mach) and later LinuxPPC (basically Red Hat for the Mac). It became definitively obsolete when Mac OS X came out, because OS X wouldn't run on it. This was just part of the march of technology, though, as OS X didn't run on official Apple Macs of that vintage either.