The problem with mac clones in the 90s was that it didn't increase mac market share. Compounding that issue was the fact that the clone makers were making models like this that were taking sales away from the higher end macs at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Computing_Corporation
As a Mac purchaser in the 90s (actually a clone, a power computing model) the 10% or so savings off real Apple hardware made a difference. macs /clones weren’t cheap, but having some other manufacturers at least make them made it seem like Apple was more viable and you were getting decent value for your money.
Of course having motorola making clones and the CPUs made for weirdness, as well as the company writing the os for clones making competing hardware. Apple wasn’t doing well and I think they were trying anything to survive.
Steve Jobs sent a Rolodex card and welcomed power computing users (Like me) to Apple when they pulled the plug.
https://www.macworld.com/article/2998000/clone-wars-when-the...
And Wikipedia has more:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Licensed_Mac...
I loved my Performa 5200 and I miss that computer like crazy, but Apple made a huge mistake with all of those models and they paid the price for it by having to write off huge amounts of old inventory.
It’s funny. Apple’s biggest weakness in the early 90’s has been transformed into their greatest strength today. Talk about learning a lesson!
Apple's lack of a traditional consumer desktop PC means the Mac Pro is always getting complaints from consumers who don't understand the difference between the desktop and workstation market segments. The trashcan Mac Pro was a pretty niche product even among workstations. The MacBook Pro is less of a swiss army knife than it once was, and their other notebooks are even less willing to prioritize anything over being thin and light. Apple's never even attempted to entice gamers (much to their vocal dismay and derision), even though no other major PC vendor has cared as much about ensuring every machine has a decent GPU.
The people who do love gaming and prefer Macs are probably better off buying a console. Those machines, of course, have no margin at all. I think this is the way Apple looks at it as well.
I don't think Apple needs to go all in on competing with PC makers, by any stretch. But it would have been nice to see a lower-end version of the Mac Pro that started at, say, $2999. And that's not too crazy, given that the first Intel-based Mac Pro started at $2499. (Actually, you could get a build-to-order one with a slower CPU that started at $2199!)
The new Mini and 27" iMacs can have their RAM upgraded. I believe in the case of the iMac it's possible (although terrifying) to upgrade storage as well.
I'd too love to see a MacPro that's not a luxury item but, with the massive precision milled shell and exquisite structure, that is unlikely to happen. I'm guessing a substantial part of the BoM is in that chassis.
OTOH, you can get a lot of workstation for a lot less with the Mini and iMac/iMac Pro. 18-core and 256 GB of RAM is a lot of workstation.
You're probably right about the Mac Pro and its chassis; to go cheaper they'd have to be willing to go a little exotic. I suspect the Mac mini is supposed to be in that space. I suspect that rather than a cheaper Mac Pro, we'd be more likely[1] to see the Mini divided into "Mini" and "Mini Pro" lines -- I know the current model is more "Pro" than the previous generations, but they could be split in a way that lets them go down a bit more on the lower end and adds a few more options on the high end.
[1] More likely than a cheaper Mac Pro, but still not actually likely to happen. I know it's a bit of dreamcasting. :)
Even with the prodigious resources Apple has, the lines are a bit out of sync with some odd limitations (such as the inexpandable everything on the 21 inch iMac or the different keyboards in the MacBook Pro line)
There's the crowd that ogles price-performance, that buys things like Ryzen 3600s and RX480s and 1050s. They're DIY builders.
Then you've got the splash-the-cash crowd, who buy machines from boutique shops and expensive prebuilds with $500 paint jobs on the case and "We have a GPU that's 2% faster and 40% more expensive". Apple could potentially build something in that niche.
However, their shift to home-built silicon is not going to do them any favours as long as most gaming takes place on Windows.
Controlling both hardware and software roadmaps allows IBM to use one as a force-multiplier for the other.
The death of the mainframe has been predicted since the 80's and doesn't seem to be any nearer now than it was then.
It'd be fair to point out that Jobs could have learned this lesson without IBM's help - as NeXT was failing, it wound down its hardware business to sell its OS and other software to run on other hardware and operating systems. At that point, it couldn't innovate like they did with their workstation with MO storage (which was a bad idea) or the built-in DSP (which was a good one). They would have to differentiate on software alone, something that's much, much more difficult to do.
MVS 3.8j was, however, the last version of MVS that was both available from IBM without a license and which lacked copyright protection under which IBM could prohibit unrestricted use.
And, to be perfectly pedantic, a number of z/Architecture "clones" now exist in the form of software emulators — including at least one[1] developed and sold by IBM itself — and these are perfectly capable of running more recent z/OS releases, possible license complications notwithstanding.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/products/z-development-test-environment
As for the ZDTE, we can call it "virtual IBM hardware" ;-)
Of course then a couple years later all the new Macs were Intel.
Instead clone makers ate Apple's high-margin, high-end, machines. So Gil Amelio, CEO at the time, bumped the MacOS version to 8 in order to renegotiate the deals (which were all for MacOS 7.x) to pay Apple a %age of the value of the machines instead, so that even if someone sold a high-margin machine instead of Apple, Apple would still make a profit on the deal.
Gil Amelio got ousted by Steve Jobs, who contrary to popular belief, actually attempted to continue the clone license negotiations, but even he failed. In the end, only UMAX got a MacOS 8 license, and the program died out.