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.
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