Comment by mvexel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mvexel | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised that there was not more mention of the clones of the mid 1990s. The Pioneer clone mentioned in the article sure is an interesting curiosity, but clone brands like Motorola (Starmax) and Power Computing were much more widely available. My brother had a really generic looking beige tower that was a 68040 Mac, from one of those brands. They were equivalent to a mid-to-high-end Performa, but significantly more affordable. I would love to hear more stories of folks who owned one of those. The clone era was short lived, IIRC once they became too successful Apple ceased the licensing program and that was the end of that.

Here's a Starmax ad from 1997: https://archive.org/details/MacWorld9710October1997/page/n7/...

Apparently Apple had expected that the clones would pick up the bottom end of the market - make Macs affordable to a broader range of people. While some of that no doubt happened, the greater profit was to be had in the upper end where Apple's margins were high, and Clone makers had a lot of room to undercut them.

The clone period was great in the sense of making Macs affordable to people, and really stretching the performance of systems. Power Computing was especially good at this and really gave Apple a run for its money.

At the end of the day, the vision of the Macintosh was a product where the hardware and the software were built in sync - the computer and the OS were the product together. The clone era never really fit in with this.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple he killed the clone program because it was killing Apple, and perhaps more importantly to him, it didn't correlate with his vision of computing.

I think this article is mostly about machines that look strange. Most of those clones are way closer to “bland” than to “strange”, making it perfectly understandable that the article doesn’t mention them.

Couldn’t have been a 68040, clones didn’t start until well into the PowerPC era (I think the slowest clones were maybe 100 or 120MHz PowerPC 603).

You're right! It was probably a 603.

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