GoKawiilYou hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we know a fair bit about Apricot’s triumphs and struggles in the highly competitive PC market of the 1980s and 90s. It was on June 30, 1999 that Apricot closed its factory in Scotland and wound down its brand.
I have to give credit to longtime reader Gary Osborne for alerting me to the existence of this TV show. In the early 1990s, the BBC had a TV series called Trouble Shooter. In it, Sir John Harvey-Jones visits troubled manufacturing businesses and helps uncover and solve their problems. It reminds me in some ways of the modern TV series Kitchen Nightmares, where Gordon Ramsay visits restaurants and tries to turn them around in a week, except these weren’t restaurants. In episode 3 of Trouble Shooter, Harvey-Jones visited Apricot Computers in mid-1989. The episode aired in 1990. Thanks to that TV episode, we know more about Apricot’s inner workings than we do about the typical 1980s and 90s PC clone manufacturer.
What was Apricot Computers?
Apricot was an interesting computer company. They were the first company to ship a 486-based PC in 1989. Arguably that’s not quite as noteworthy as being the first to ship a 386-based PC, but they still beat all the big names in shipping a 486, including Compaq and IBM. Apricot was also noteworthy in licensing Microchannel from IBM. While Tandy and Dell announced Microchannel PCs, Apricot actually shipped them in quantity and stuck with the architecture for several years, selling them alongside conventional AT designs rather than choosing one or the other. And Apricot was interesting in that they bucked outsourcing design and manufacturing to Asia longer than many PC makers did. They designed their PCs in Birmingham, England, and manufactured them in Glenrothes, Scotland.
The challenges Apricot faced were not at all unlike the challenges companies attempting to design and build computers in the United States circa 1989 faced. It was much cheaper to build computers in Asia. And it was increasingly cheaper to outsource the design too. In that sense, Apricot’s struggles designing and building computers in the UK didn’t seem at all unfamiliar to me.
Apricot on Trouble Shooter
Harvey-Jones described Apricot’s problem as a minnow trying to swim with large multinational whales and sharks.
Apricot’s founder, Roger Foster, said the maintenance was the most profitable side of the business, but that it existed because Apricot sold hardware. The hardware side was not profitable. Harvey-Jones then turned to see if the software side of Apricot’s business, which was also profitable, relied on the hardware manufacturing. Of course, he found it didn’t. Apricot’s software ran on other IBM PC-compatible systems too.
The problems with UK-based design and manufacturing
What Harvey-Jones found was that research and development was expensive, and it fed into the hardware manufacturing, but not into the software or maintenance sides of the business. Harvey-Jones’s idea was to raise prices to cover the overhead and raise profits. When that proved a nonstarter, he visited the factory to see if cost reduction might be possible.
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