Technovia: Why Mac cloning today wouldn't be like Mac cloning ten years ago
Max
· 1 year ago
Ian, I'm not sure that Apple needs the cloners today or would even want them. As you and Ron point out, Apple doesn't really attack the low end of the market, but there's a good chance that if it ceded that niche to other companies via license, the shoddiness of cut-rate materials and labor would make tech support for such machines a real headache. The cloners would blame OS X for troubles, Apple would fault the hardware and customers would fume. My guess is that most lowlow-end computer buyers aren't tech-savvy and would needs lots of hand-holding. Apple would still have to carry the cost of developing OS X and might even have to help the cloners with hardware design.
Remember also that 10+ years ago Apple had dropped the ball on improving and ultimately replacing Mac OS--it wasn't just the hardware that sucked. Apple was desperate to expand its sales after Win95 proved "good enough", but didn't find too many takers. It ultimately licensed the OS to companies that were either new to making computers or merely startups. and IIRC the license terms weren't exactly stacked in Apple's favor. These companies had NO established customer base for computer sales and were offering their machines in the same geographic regions as Apple. They were bound to cannibalize Apple's sales (MacWorld.com might have archived articles analyzing the impact of clones' sales on Apple's sales). The cloners also didn't have to carry the cost of software and hardware R&D as Apple did.
Today, Apple stores and the halo effects of iPod and iPhone sales have helped Jobs et al break out of the ghetto and reach new customers--something the cloners were supposed to do for Apple. Jobs probably doesn't think that the lowlow end of compute sales is worth the headache of supporting low-quality hardware and coddling computer newbies. He is apparently NOT averse to letting other companies modify Apple machines and re-sell them, though--note the Axiotron touch-screen tablet Mac available at Other World Computing.
Jobs called the cloners "leaches" and he was correct. They didn't try to expand the market at all, which was the rallying cry, in fact Power Computing routinely advertised their computers directly against Apple's in Mac magazines. So let's get this straight. They were paying next to nothing for the OS ..weren't helping with the R&D costs yet wanted to come eat at the table with Apple. I would have given them the boot as well. Cloning will not come back anytime soon for consumer Macs. It makes no financial sense.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
I think that the "leeches" comment is a perfect illustration of my final point - so thanks for reminding me about it! If the cloners were taking more money out of Apple than putting money into it, then Apple was underpricing its licenses - and given that Apple set the price in the first place, whose responsibility do you think that was?
As for expanding the market, remember that figure from the Macworld story. 50% of Power Computing customers were not former Apple customers, which indicates that they did, in fact, expand the market. Other manufacturers, like UMAX, grew Mac market share in territories where Apple had traditionally had little sales, like south east Asia (outside Japan).
I don't know whether you actually know the figure that Apple was charging its licensees: around $50 was what I heard from more than one clone maker at the time. But it's worth remembering two points. First, on every machine which was not a substitution for Apple, that was almost all profit (the costs to Apple of supporting the clone programme were minimal, as cloners had to use motherboard designs licensed from Apple, too). Second, on low-end machines at least, Apple's margins at the time were very thin. When someone bought a Power Tower rather than a Power Mac, Apple's revenue might have fallen by $1500, but its lost profits were probably more like $150.
But again, to come back to the real point: Power Computing were able to directly compare their machines to Apple's, and find Apple wanting, because Apple's machines were crap. Today, Apple's machines are very much not crap - I think any potential cloner who went down the "go up against Apple" route now would find themselves out of business fast, and not because Jobs would pull their license.
Tedious
· 1 year ago
Apple doesn't spend R&D money on OS development for license sales. They do it to give customers of it's hardware a better value. Every non-hardware move they make is to increase the value of their hardware. When you examine Apple's post-1997 history from that perspective, every move makes sense ...and every lack-of-move does, too.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
i don't think I would disagree with any of your comment.
adm
· 1 year ago
Apple sells hardware. The make software... so that they can sell hardware. They are very VERY up front about this. Most importantly, Apple - and by 'Apple', of course, I mean 'Steve' - has reinvented Apple in the last 10 years by selling 'the whole product'. It's this 'whole product' concept that has enabled Apple to make inroads.
You've left some math out. I'm sure you know this, but it bares repeating. Every box of Mac OS they sold to a cloner maker was nearly guaranteed to lose them a hardware sale, as you discussed. I know as a reseller of Apple hardware, at the time we were getting 10%-20% margins. If Apple was getting even 5% markup on their hardware (and that's a pretty conservative number), they still received twice as much from a $2000 sale of hardware then they were getting from selling the OS to a cloner. So almost ever box of Mac OS lost them money. Businesses are supposed to make money, not lose it.
Further more, the clones were also "cheap, horrible machines for consumers which had no style, and just looked like slightly quirky beige boxes." Do you remember the Umax boxes? Yikes! Even PowerComputing boxes were utilitarian. "[Apple's] professional range was just dull, and not well-engineered," as were all the other clone makers. I cut my hands on the hardware inside more clones than I care to remember. They used cheap parts because they were buying at quantities less than 10% that of Apple. They had to keep prices down somehow. Have you been inside a Dell or a Gateway? Have you been inside a Mac Pro?
So, if Apple currently makes their money on hardware, and if they sell hardware in a market completely dominated by Windows by having a really cool "whole product" whose functionality is very difficult or impossible to duplicate on another platform, why would Apple want to make a quick buck on selling boxes of Mac OS to competitors? The chances of Dell clones cannibalizing Apple sales is pretty high, even if they sell sub-$1000 Macs. Steven Maker, the NPD Group's vice president of industry analysis, said in an interview with eWeek, "If you don't give people a choice, people will spend more." <http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/chann...>
Apple's had the two most profitable quarters in its history in the last year. Sounds like they're doing pretty well without cloners. Someday, perhaps they'll have to deal with Monoply status. Then, perhaps, the answer may be 'cloning'. But at less than 5% worldwide market share, I think that's a little premature.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
"Every box of Mac OS they sold to a cloner maker was nearly guaranteed to lose them a hardware sale, as you discussed."
50% of Power Computing sales went to people who would otherwise have not bought any kind of Mac.
Yes, I've been inside a Mac Pro. And I've also been inside a 4400, which of course is the kind of machine that we were comparing with the clones at the time. And don't forget that the cloners were, because of the licensing system, using exactly the same motherboards (largely from the same manufacturers) as Apple. They were cheaply made... but so were the Apple's at the time.
zato
· 1 year ago
"Power Computing were able to directly compare their machines to Apple's, and find Apple wanting, because Apple's machines were crap." I have 3 of them in this room and all still work fine. They are made the same way all Macs are made, with components from the best manufacturers. My PowerMacs came with Hitachi drives, Toshiba memory, and IBM PowerPC CPU's. The enclosure may not have been the greatest industrial design, but it's made very well. The PeeCee's at the time were far uglier. I also have a Color Classic on my desk. Still works fine, although slowly. It still makes me smile when I look at it.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
You have the ones that survived. The ones that died tended to do so early.
Brian
· 1 year ago
Ian, I don't know where you are coming from with this 'they were crap then' attitude. They most definitely were not crap back then. Nor were they underperforming. They skunked Intel machines rather soundly at a wide variety of tasks/benchmarks. Look it up. Intel had still not caught up to PPC. And Windows 95 was better than Mac OS? No way. Win 95 was still weak though it finally looked decent, it left out so much of what the mac could do easily. Win 95 I think added 'shortcuts' but this was like a bad copy of 'aliases' especially since shortcuts didn't even work over the network.
What really 'saved' Apple wasn't so much the iMac (brilliant marketing though it was). The G3 chip was HUGE. I knew this from my PowerMac G3, which was a wonderfully designed computer, with a door on the side that was much like today's Mac Pro cases--even on the desktop, the whole unit unfolded on the desk so that you could get to any component. Perhaps you were referring to earlier machines, some of those were a bit harder to work with, but the ALL came with great components.
Don
· 1 year ago
I love re-writes and reinterpretations of history in an attempt to prove pet-theories. It's not that everyone doesn't do it, it's just that it's funny.
Sorry, Ian, but you can't re-write history so soon after it happened. Wait another decade or two and continue calling yourself a "pundit" and maybe someone will believe you.
While it is true that the Macs of that period weren't all the greatest, it doesn't mean that they weren't good and often beating the tar out of any PC box-stuffers. But that wasn't the problem with the cloners.
The problem is one that you admitted but don't even see. Apple gave licenses to companies to clone the Mac with the specific intention that they market to people not already in the Mac fold. Apple clearly stated this on several occasions but stupidly did not include such a clause in the license.
As a result, the cloners, like leeches on the Apple body, advertised and marketed directly to where they knew they could make money: not to the general computer market, but to the Apple Mac market. Magazines at that time directed toward Windows users ran few or no ads from the cloners while the Mac-oriented magazines were filled with them. MacWeek was awash with them. Since they did little or no R&D compared to Apple, they could undercut Apple's pricing with marginally better boxes.
Had Apple put into the licenses where the cloners could market, it would be likely that they and Apple as a result, would have been successful. But Apple didn't and the cloners went for the quick buck rather than for the more difficult conversion dollar.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
I'd love to know what pet theory you think I'm putting forward, but that's by the by.
"As a result, the cloners, like leeches on the Apple body, advertised and marketed directly to where they knew they could make money: not to the general computer market, but to the Apple Mac market."
Given that Apple was licensing them the mobo designs too, this is perhaps unsurprising. In fact, Apple refused to license designs (like Power's never-released portable) which deviated from their designs.
So work it out. Cloners had to sell essentially the same machines, running essentially the same software. How do you think they're going to compete?
"Since they did little or no R&D compared to Apple...."
Not true of Motorola, of course, but we'll let that one pass.
"...they could undercut Apple's pricing with marginally better boxes.:
In which case the licensing deal was underpaying Apple. Which, given Apple gave the licenses out in the first place, is whose fault exactly?
Bob Durling
· 1 year ago
As I understand it: 1. The cloners had to get their design tested & verified for compatibility by Apple before a motherboard design could be shipped. THAT was expensive for Apple. 2. Their MoBos were different from Apple's designs and often took marketshare from the high end.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
No, that's not quite correct. Apple initally licensed a set of motherboard designs to cloners, which it also used itself in some machines (like the aforementioned 4400). This meant that what the licensees could do in terms of innovative design was a little limited.
However, in collaboration with (I think - memory on this is hazy) IBM, Apple created CHRP - the Common Hardware Reference Platform. This was a standardised system archiecture for PowerPC-based systems, effectively a set of ground rules to create motherboards. It specified things like using OpenFirmware - and in theory, any mobo designed to CHRP could, with the addition of the correct Mac ROM, run Mac OS.
That was the big danger point for Apple. If other manufacturers could build mobos without using Apple designs, they could build better mobos than Apple - at which point, Apple would have effectively begun the slide to being an OS vendor.
Unless, of course, it improved it's own machines...
Brian
· 1 year ago
Don, you nailed it for me. Thanks.
Richard Taylor
· 1 year ago
There is an opportunity to put Windows, if not in the ground for good, then certainly in a contentious position against the Mac. To be successful, Apple would need to retain exclusivity for its own machines by selling an earlier or lesser system, maybe by making iLife an option rather than something that comes with OS X. Apple would need to certify the hardware, something Microsoft should have done in a more stringent manner long ago. Apple would need to hire an IT sales staff and go after the business market. Those things said, the Mac could become the de-facto standard within half a decade, particularly if it purchased/licensed Parallels or one of its competitors and provided Windows out of the OS X box.
Will it happen? No. Because the truth is, Jobs doesn't want to be Microsoft. He wants to be BETTER than Microsoft, and to do that market share is not the defining issue, but rather style, taste, and elegance.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
Oh, you're totally right (and I think this is the point that lots of people are missing). Apple will never - and, I believe, should never - license Mac OS to anyone. But that's not the same thing as saying "it didn't work once, therefore it could never work". It could work, but Apple's business model would be very different, and much less fun.
Brian
· 1 year ago
Personally, I think Jobs is just waiting for the right moment to pounce. Perhaps after M$ spends all it's money on Yahoo! or some other incredibly dumb idea.
waveney
· 1 year ago
"However, there exist certain niches which, for its own reasons, Apple doesn't want to play in. Low-power sub-notebooks, like the eeePC for one. Tablet PCs for another. These niches are either too small for a big company to bother with, or low-margin businesses that don't make sense for Apple strategically.
Apple does not want to fill these niches. Other companies could, at no risk to Apple's market share."
Couldn't disagree more. Apple knows that 'any' sale into the lower rung of the market will inevitably cannibalise a sale of the next rung up the spec ladder. Apple's whole business pivots on the basic assumption that you can convert a lower-end buyer ie. upsell, to the lowest rung of Apple's range 'and' make more money from that sale, if the value equation(included software, design etc) is good enough.
Just because Apple doesn't compete in the ultra low cost arena doesn't mean they shouldn't have any influence over those buyers. After all, if there is no dime a dozen machine and the buyer still wants an Apple, then they will save a little more and feel better about their purchase when they get it. The low end stuff just takes the shine off the high margin products.
Today is no different at all really.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
You're assuming that people will buy a machine which doesn't meet their needs solely because it is from Apple. Someone who's in the market for a £300 laptop with a 9in screen just doesn't buy an Apple - they don't somehow magically decide that what they really want is a MacBook Air. So no, there's no lost sales.
James Bailey
· 1 year ago
I'll make a single comment. Ian, you are not smarter than Steve Jobs. That's it.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
Well James, I think you're misreading what I'm saying. I'm not saying that Jobs should restart a clone programme. I'm saying that the situation is different today: Apple is more resiliant, it's machines are better and would be better-equipped to compete against other manufacturers running Mac OS X.
James Bailey
· 1 year ago
Hmm, so you don't think Apple should restart its cloning program? Then what was the point of the post? If and when Apple determines that cloning is good to the bottom line, then they will start doing it again. I'm not about to second guess Apple's current management. They have done nearly everything right since Jobs came back.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
I guess the point of the post was simply to say that the Apple of today is not the Apple of 1997. It's a much, much stronger beast with much better machines. That changes the ground rules a lot when you consider the option of licensing.
That means, of course, that simply saying "they tried it once and look what happened" isn't a good argument. In fact, what it's basically saying that the Apple of today couldn't take on and beat a bunch of companies like Power. That, to me, seems crazy.
Ron
· 1 year ago
I was around back then. Apple's machine's weren't considered crap--at least not by any Mac users I knew. And PC users called them crap sight unseen, just out of the us-vs-them thing. I had a PC and a Mac back then, and you're very wrong if you think Apple's machines were crap compared with PCs back then. The margin of superiority was much slimmer back then, and there were areas in which PCs trumped Macs. But they weren't crap.
Then, as now, Apple received a ton of criticism because they didn't cater to the low end of the market. As several posters accurately remember, this was the market that the cloners were supposed to go after. It was the mantra of the new era of cloners. Finally, we'd see cheap Macs. But we didn't.
And we didn't see companies come along that ate Apple's lunch because they built wonderfully superior products. I had a PowerComputing machine. It was not an especially nice machine. It was the ugliest Mac I've ever had, by far; a generic case, standard components, no styling.
Why did I buy one? The same reason a lot of people did, and the same reason Apple cut them loose. They'd gone after the high end Mac market. That's where the highest margins were, and it was easiest to undercut Apple at those price points. They had no interest at all in the low-end market. Also, they were able to get faster chips than Apple. Remember? Apple needed to buy in larger quantities, and Motorola didn't make its fast chips in high enough quantities. So PowerComputing often managed to sell a faster machine at a slightly lower price. Apple lost a huge chunk of its high-end sales.
Plus there were more problems with instability. At least part of that problem was the proliferation of hardware types they had to test for. It's the one area I'll tip my hat to Microsoft about. They have to do a lot more hardware compatibility tests.
Those were very ugly times. Most of us who lived through it have no wish to see history repeat.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
I was around back then, too, Ron. I made my living writing about and reviewing those machines. Compared to the standards of Apple today, they really were crap.
Ron
· 1 year ago
I'm very sorry I missed your reviews. "Compared to the Macs you'll see 13 years from now, this 1995 Mac is crap." What magazine was that in? (I was reading MacWeek back then. They talked about the future too, but they only managed about 1-2 months in advance, the poor saps.) 1) Nobody dropped Apple for that reason. Nobody. 2) Compared to the standards of Apple today, all computers back then really were crap. 3) Compared to the standards of Apple today, all other computers right now really are crap. 4) Compared to the standards of Apple today, whatever clones you hope to see really will be crap.
That's one of the things that turned Apple around. The machines are extremely high quality now. That why Apple and J. Ive have the record for number of Black Pencil design awards. These machines aren't just flash. There's great cleverness embodied in these designs. I can see why you might feel that this would be enough to protect them against clones in a way that it didn't in 1995. But you'll still be wrong if they open up those gates again.
There will be people who would have bought a Mac that will buy a clone instead. This much is certain. Who will that be? The cloners won't go after the markets you dream about for the exact same reason Apple doesn't: because they're small. Either in terms of margins, or in terms of percentage, they're small. Apple has found the sweet spots in their market. After a very short pause, they'll do exactly what PowerComputing did. They'll go after the high end, undercutting Apple by enough that people will turn a blind eye to the lower quality of the machine. When challenged, they'll re-cast the value proposition as "bang for the buck". Apple will lose high end sales, high end margins. These things WILL happen.
You appear to be saying that these losses will be offset but something else that will happen as well, like an expansion of the market. Each high end hardware sale lost would have to be offset by a LOT of software licenses. If Apple loses a $3000 sale and their margin at that price point is 33% (which is close to the mark, if memory serves), they have to sell how many licenses of Mac OS X to make up for that? Assuming they charged $100 per license and that we considered that $100 pure profit, the cloner would have to sell 10 machines non-cannibalizing sales for every 1 cannibalizing one. That’s the argument you have to make. And not only that, because it won't be $100, and it isn't pure profit, and they won't be growing the market by tenfold.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
Let me illustrate what I mean about the difference in machines then and now - in fact, between then and just a couple of years later. Imagine that you had a choice between a machine which had the design of the first iMac, and the 4400 - but the 4400 has been magically upgraded so that it's processor speed, hard drive, and memory are equivalent in performance to the iMac.
Now, which one would you think was the better machine? I'm hoping you'll agree that it would be the iMac! :)
And that's the difference between the Apple of 1996, pre-Jobs, and the Apple of today. Then, Apple really relied on two elements to differentiate it: the Mac OS (7), and to a lesser extent the performance of PowerPC compared to the Intel chips of the day. And unfortunately, it had headed down a few dead-ends in software which had hobbled the development of OS 7 (Copland, OpenDoc, the whole Taligent mess), and the PowerPC had proved to not quite be the powerhouse that everyone expected it to be. And, with a few honourable exceptions (like the "K2" case design), it's industrial design was not as great as it used to be.
Today, Jobs has addressed all those issues. OS X is leading the pack of operating systems in ease of use, aesthetics, and power. Performance is second to none. And industrial design... well, the countless awards no-doubt decorating Jonny Ive's office speak for themselves.
(BTW, I worked on MacUser UK for eight years, from 1995 to 2003, ending my time there as editor. And yes, I did give some machines a pretty bad review :) )
Brian
· 1 year ago
Actually, they were not crap then, and if you wrote about them, you weren't read very widely.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
<shrug> The biggest selling Mac and longest-established magazine in the country I lived in. But obviously, from your perspective, if someone disagrees with you the right thing to do is question their credentials.
mikhailovitch
· 1 year ago
I'd disagree with you on just two things. We had both Win 95 and Macs at work back then, and Win95 was not a better choice for consumers at that time, by any stretch of the imagination. Even staff with Windows at home gravitated to the Macs over time. The Microsoft ecosystem DID have some advantages for business users, for sure - but not many for consumers. And I'd agree with Ron - the clone manufacturers went for the high end, high margin end of the market - and that hurt Apple much more than the simple sales numbers might suggest.
zato
· 1 year ago
"You have the ones that survived. The ones that died tended to do so early." I have here a 6100, a 5500, a 7200, a 7500, a Color Classic, an iMac G3-400 graphite, and an eMac. all have worked perfectly to this day. That just about covers the 90's except for the pro machines (8600, 9600). Just what Macs are "crap"? As usual, Ian, you just repeat what the Microsoft black-PR manual tells you to say.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
God bless you Zato, how I've missed you. :)
I'll repeat again: I tested a lot of those machines. Compared to the Macs of today (and that's the important point here), they were crap.
Ron
· 1 year ago
You keep saying that. But you could say the same thing about PCs. "Compared to the PCs of today (and that's the important point here), they were crap." I'm not a fan of Windows or of the quality of modern PCs, but they're loads better that what was running around in 1995. Such comparisons can be reiterated endlessly, but I just don't think it gets us anywhere.
Compared to the Macs of today, the Macs in 1995 were crap. And so were PCs. PCs have gotten better. Macs have gotten even better still. But still, I think the consensus back then was that Macs of the time were better than PCs of the time. We lost a lot of people to Win95 because not enough people believed that, to be sure. But it wasn't because of this equation AbsoluteValue(Win95) > AbsoluteValue(Mac) but rather this one BangForTheBuck(Win95) > BangForTheBuck(Mac).
In every forum you can still see tons of people who think the second metric is the only one that counts. And they view the first metric as just being flash and glitter, only for suckers. Too few people will understand the value proposition you think they'll see. They'll look at $$(Brand Name Mac) > $$(generic mac) and then think Mac == Mac and BangForTheBuck(Brand Name Mac) < BangForTheBuck(generic mac) especially at the high end, and suddenly, the question will once again go to "Why'd you buy an _Apple_ Mac? What a sucker. I got one from Two Guys in a Basement, Inc. and it doesn't everything yours does, PLUS it's got a floppy. People still use those, you know." And next year, they'll be saying "Christ, I hate Macs. They crash all the time." They'll be deaf to people who tell them their Brand Name Mac doesn't crash like that. They'll still be angry at Apple for failing to do enough testing on their POS.
Which is why that $100 Apple might charge for a license doesn't count even as ($100 - TheCostOfPackaging). In allowing clones, Apple has to commit a lot more resources to testing these non-Apple designs.
Ron
· 1 year ago
**sorry... the sentence above should read "...and it DOES everything yours does, plus it's got a floppy."
Freudian slip :)
Brian
· 1 year ago
Zato had a point. I had a LOT of these machines as well, and they were all bette than the PC alternatives at the time, mostly because of OS differences. Intel had almost caught up with the early PPCs, but the G3 (which was available in the PowerMac before the original iMac) SKUNKED Intel garbage at the time. (Thank you very much.)
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
The Power Mac G3 first appeared in November 1997, the same month that Apple ended the clone programme. What you probably don't know - because you never got hold of the machine - is that the Motorola StarMax 6000, which would have been released at the same time, was actually faster than the first Apple G3's. I know. I helped test them.
Ron
· 1 year ago
To be fair to Ian, I don't think Microsoft's PR manuals are telling him to say that the current Macs are so much superior to potential clones that Apple could prosper if they allowed clones again.
And that's what he's saying. I disagree with him, but I think you're being pretty unfair. I don't remember what machine I had right before my PowerComputing machine. I think it was a 5200 (one of the all-in-one things). I loved the little thing. (and you need to take the iMac out of your list, because that one belongs to the era Ian is complimenting, if I understand him). As much as I loved my 5200, I went nuts for the iMac. I normally buy computers at a certain interval. But the iMac was the first machine that ever made me break that cycle. I think I had a 6 month old machine, and I still bought an iMac the very first time I saw one.
Strictly speaking, what he's saying is true: compared to today's machines, the machines of the cloning-time were crap. My point is that it's not a worthwhile comparison. See my other posts, where I've already gone on at too much length. (Pause while I hearken back to the first time I ever saw the iMac. SUCH a thing of beauty. Bondy Blue, baby. I kinda miss the colors... but I have to admit that Bondy Blue was really the only one I ever flipped over. I never understood why they couldn't bring that color back. Oh well. I still own that iMac, and it still runs. Soooooo slow :) But I remember when we thought it was blazing fast)
Ron
· 1 year ago
Peace, Ian. We can agree to disagree. I understand what you're saying. To some extent, I think you're right. I just don't think enough people will see it your way. Too few people understand quality. We can rejoice, however, that enough people DO understand quality to allow the Mac to survive and prosper. But remember: only one company has survived by licensing their OS. Everyone else who has done it in the commodity market has failed. Apple is not eager to see if it can survive, after already once failing. Even if your reasoning is sound, they've got enough evidence to suggest it would harm them again, if they tried it again. And look at them now. They're absolutely thriving. They're firing on all cylinders. Why do you so fervently wish to seem them embark upon such a questionable distraction? It would greatly lengthen the time between releases of OS X, for instance, and that extra time wouldn't be in adding features but in testing all the different platforms. It would take more time, and there would STILL be more bugs.
And frankly, Macs just are as overly pricey as they once were. At a given price point, they're competitive. It's just that they don't exist at the lower price points. Like I say, though, Mac cloners historically didn't go after that price point, and I don't see any compelling reason to think they will. And if Apple tries to word the license that way, it'll get struck down in court (think about it a second), and everyone will then immediately pile up on the high end.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
Some very good points there, Ron. So yes, let's agree to disagree :)
vic
· 1 year ago
Interesting discussion. My perception is that Apple is intent on building its brand internationally by controlling the buying experience. Clones would devalue the Apple brand without question. Further, as a company Apple strives to maintain margins even at the expense of market share—I do not expect that preoccupation to change.
Also please observe how limited the computer product line is compared to the competition. Simplification is the rule----marginal products have no place in the Mac ecosystem.
Last point: in those lost Clone years Apple made (assembled) their own boxes. Not today. No cost disadvantage now given Far east contract manufacturing coupled with Apple's superb supply chain management and buying power.
For the record my wife and I own a 15" MB Pro, 24" iMac, G4 Tower, a dead PowerMac and a have veritable Mac Museum in the garage including a Mac Classic II—great machine for its time.
adm
· 1 year ago
Ian,
With respect, I think you're being disingenuous when you say the point of your article was not to put forward that Apple should consider re-evaluating a cloning program. If you are honestly only trying to point out that the Apple of today is significantly different than the Apple of 10 years ago, few people would have read your post and I doubt you would even have bothered to type it. I would imagine that it's as obvious to your readers as the weather.
Your point, made in bold, is that Apple lost market share due to the poor quality of their computers. It was this poor quality that caused customers to look elsewhere. Some of them found the equally poor quality clones. Finally, you conclude that since people where buying clones in order to avoid quality concerns from Apple hardware (a dubious conclusion, given the poor quality of the clones and Wintel boxes) and since Apple no longer has these quality concerns, then Apple would do well to reconsider licensing their OS.
The PCC boxes were so much like Wintel boxes that they were regularly reviewed as such <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1563/is_...>. The Umax boxes were worse. Radius tried that funky wavey front panel, which at least made it obvious that they weren't PC's. But as you probably know, all of them were painful to open and work on. All of them used the same logic board designs, whether or not they used the identical components. All of them were trying to compete with Apple on price while selling less than 10% of Apple's volume. And all of this while the PC's of the day were abhorrently unattractive, with their own - admittedly less proprietary - shoddy workmanship. In the crowd of computers from that era, Apple's really don't seem like they stand out as shoddy.
There are a lot of issues to harp on from 1995-1997. I wouldn't dig in your heals over the quality of the Apple line.
As an aside, Apple almost never demonstrated hardware that it wasn't ready to release within the next quarter. I bring this point up because Motorola and Power Computing regularly did. The StarMax 6000, as you know, was a CHRP box running the fast G3 chips coming off the press. I'm certain you know this, but it bears mentioning to readers who don't. When chips come off the press, their ability to clock up to higher speeds is not equal. Some are better than others, which allow them to be clocked up faster. The distribution of chips coming off the assembly line, then, looks a bit like a bell curve, with the majority of the chips unable to reach the speeds of the very fastest chips, who are in the small minority at the beginning of the curve. If all you have to do is put together a handful of demo units, then you can really pull out the stops and hand-pick a few high-end chips from that curve, stick them in a StarMax 6000 demo unit, and bring it to Macworld. If, on the other hand, you have to be ready to ship a few hundred thousand computers with these chips in them, that's obviously a different story. Power Computing was famous for releasing the very fastest chips in their computers about three months before Apple. But when they were only going to sell 100,000 computers this year, with the majority of those having low to mid range performance CPU's, they didn't have to wait very long to stockpile enough high end CPU's. Apple, who sold more computers in a month than PCC sold in a year, typically had to stockpile for, you guessed it, three months before they could announce their product.
ianbetteridge
· 1 year ago
There's a lot of good and interesting points here, Adm. Thank you.
Perhaps saying that the Apple machines of the time were crap was the wrong way to put it. As a range, and compared to today's machines, they obviously lack a lot. But you're right to say that by and large, the licensees weren't making machines that were better. They were, of course, making machines that were faster and cheaper. And your point about the StarMax 6000 (and others) is one that I've echoed myself elsewhere.
So perhaps a better way to put it would be this: The Apple machines of the clone era had little to recommend them in terms of design over a cheaper clone. Whereas today's Macs are exceptionally lovely looking, with very good design features which actually make them physically easier to use, the ones of the years around 1996 were, by and large, pretty dull beige boxes.
If there were Mac clones today, even cheaper and faster ones, I'd still buy Apple's machines - for the wonderful, deep design. I'd rather a 10% slower iMac than an ugly beige thing that I have to hide under a desk.
There were exceptions. The 5200 was, if not a great looking machine, at least a decent all-in-one. The 8600 had the classic K2 case design which geniunely made it much easier to get into.
But these machines were exceptions, not the rule. Today, it's hard to pick out a badly designed Apple computer. Then, it was hard to pick out a good one.
Of course, a lot of this is hindsight: the 5200 looked pretty good, but compared to even a first generation iMac it's a lot less impressive. But the qualities of a machine are often relative to what's around it. Where Apple's design ethos has improved beyond all recognition since then, its competitor's haven't.
adm
· 1 year ago
Aww, that stinks. Sorry for the double post, Ian. Your website was briefly unavailable (as reported by OpenDNS). I should have looked to see if the post actually went through. =/ Feel free to clean that up. They are identical.
uh huh, right. Come back when you can build your own iMac, and make it look as good.
DrBunsen
· 1 year ago
Perhaps another way of expressing your point re the crapness of the era's machines is this:
Apple had always enjoyed a perception of superior quality and ease of use over the competition, going back to the very first Macintosh. By the time of the clones, the perceived gap between them and the competition had narrowed - Apple machines and their OS were, by and large, still superior, but they had lost their way, and they weren't getting better fast enough. You can short-hand this as "crap" if you like, but I'd consider "not LESS crap enough than the competition to justify the margins".
I used the first PowerMac (the 6100) from 1995, with the first compatible version of OS 7, and it was a crashfest. Later versions cleaned up the mess somewhat, but as a user, I might well have said "What?? This is a Mac! I paid a squizillion bucks for it, and it's CRASHING on me?? Screw this, I'll go back to Wintel."
By and large, early releases of System 7 - especially on the PPCs - were a dog's breakfast. 7.6.1 and 8.1 were much tidier, but by then the market perception damage has been done. Throw in some appallingly crippled motherboard designs - like the 5200 you cite above - headless chicken behaviour from R&D and marketing, and you had a growing perception that betting on the Mac platform was a loser's game, developers jumping ship, market share nose-diving, and stock plummeting to $14.
You're quite right that the situation today is different. If anything, it's the opposite. OS X and the Mac platform are high buzz, R&D and marketing act like they work for the same company and keep hitting home runs, developers are leaping into the fray, market share and stock keep on climbing. Apple have no need at all to re-open a licensing program, and they're hardly likely to do so just to be nice, or to go to war against Microsoft.
BillyBallo
· 1 year ago
A lot of the Mac-PC war veterans here have a comically skewed view of Apple, and are obviously unfamiliar with the European market. Mid '90s Apple machines cost twice as much and were overall slower (except on the lone, inevitable cherry-picked Photoshop benchmark) and ran less software than Wintel clones. Jobs terminated the clones program because the cloners were making faster, cheaper, better engineered Macs than Apple itself, plain and simple.
Apple won't license OSX for clones because from their perspective the OS is not a shrinkwrapped product to install on assembled hardware (the Windows model). Rather, they see it as the software half of the 'whole widget' Jobs always talks about. It is a rather subtle, non-technical distinction. The emphasis is on offering a perceived cohesive whole, and OSX on clones would disrupt that.
To effectively license OSX they'd also have to compete on hard technical merits and thinner margins, and lose the luxury mistique at the same time. They couldn't wait 3 months after everybody else to introduce a faster Intel CPU for example, for the cloners would do it as soon as possible, like they did in the PPC days. It's a lose-lose proposition for them, even if tech-minded people see it as desiderable since it's technically feasible.
Affordable SEO Services
· 1 year ago
Thanks for the awesome article! For 15 years now (I'm 26) I've been building Wintel machines and using them at my home and office because they've always been faster for the money. Windows is terrible, but the hardware has always been the draw. Something goes wrong, you replace it with parts available at any corner computer store, and 45 minutes later you're back up and running. Now, with the new Mac OS available for kickin' PC hardware, maybe both Apple and Microsoft will feel a little more compelled to make better OS's. Since they could concievably now compete for the same hardware. My wife has been BEGGING me for a Mac (school teacher), I might be able to pull the wool over her eyes with a $1,000 PC hardware machine and a Mac OS. In fact, I know she'll never know the difference, I'll be able to sleep at night knowing if something goes wrong, I can fix it myself.
All Comments
Remember also that 10+ years ago Apple had dropped the ball on improving and ultimately replacing Mac OS--it wasn't just the hardware that sucked. Apple was desperate to expand its sales after Win95 proved "good enough", but didn't find too many takers. It ultimately licensed the OS to companies that were either new to making computers or merely startups. and IIRC the license terms weren't exactly stacked in Apple's favor. These companies had NO established customer base for computer sales and were offering their machines in the same geographic regions as Apple. They were bound to cannibalize Apple's sales (MacWorld.com might have archived articles analyzing the impact of clones' sales on Apple's sales). The cloners also didn't have to carry the cost of software and hardware R&D as Apple did.
Today, Apple stores and the halo effects of iPod and iPhone sales have helped Jobs et al break out of the ghetto and reach new customers--something the cloners were supposed to do for Apple. Jobs probably doesn't think that the lowlow end of compute sales is worth the headache of supporting low-quality hardware and coddling computer newbies. He is apparently NOT averse to letting other companies modify Apple machines and re-sell them, though--note the Axiotron touch-screen tablet Mac available at Other World Computing.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Modbook
As for expanding the market, remember that figure from the Macworld story. 50% of Power Computing customers were not former Apple customers, which indicates that they did, in fact, expand the market. Other manufacturers, like UMAX, grew Mac market share in territories where Apple had traditionally had little sales, like south east Asia (outside Japan).
I don't know whether you actually know the figure that Apple was charging its licensees: around $50 was what I heard from more than one clone maker at the time. But it's worth remembering two points. First, on every machine which was not a substitution for Apple, that was almost all profit (the costs to Apple of supporting the clone programme were minimal, as cloners had to use motherboard designs licensed from Apple, too). Second, on low-end machines at least, Apple's margins at the time were very thin. When someone bought a Power Tower rather than a Power Mac, Apple's revenue might have fallen by $1500, but its lost profits were probably more like $150.
But again, to come back to the real point: Power Computing were able to directly compare their machines to Apple's, and find Apple wanting, because Apple's machines were crap. Today, Apple's machines are very much not crap - I think any potential cloner who went down the "go up against Apple" route now would find themselves out of business fast, and not because Jobs would pull their license.
You've left some math out. I'm sure you know this, but it bares repeating. Every box of Mac OS they sold to a cloner maker was nearly guaranteed to lose them a hardware sale, as you discussed. I know as a reseller of Apple hardware, at the time we were getting 10%-20% margins. If Apple was getting even 5% markup on their hardware (and that's a pretty conservative number), they still received twice as much from a $2000 sale of hardware then they were getting from selling the OS to a cloner. So almost ever box of Mac OS lost them money. Businesses are supposed to make money, not lose it.
Further more, the clones were also "cheap, horrible machines for consumers which had no style, and just looked like slightly quirky beige boxes." Do you remember the Umax boxes? Yikes! Even PowerComputing boxes were utilitarian. "[Apple's] professional range was just dull, and not well-engineered," as were all the other clone makers. I cut my hands on the hardware inside more clones than I care to remember. They used cheap parts because they were buying at quantities less than 10% that of Apple. They had to keep prices down somehow. Have you been inside a Dell or a Gateway? Have you been inside a Mac Pro?
So, if Apple currently makes their money on hardware, and if they sell hardware in a market completely dominated by Windows by having a really cool "whole product" whose functionality is very difficult or impossible to duplicate on another platform, why would Apple want to make a quick buck on selling boxes of Mac OS to competitors? The chances of Dell clones cannibalizing Apple sales is pretty high, even if they sell sub-$1000 Macs. Steven Maker, the NPD Group's vice president of industry analysis, said in an interview with eWeek, "If you don't give people a choice, people will spend more." <http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/chann...>
Apple's had the two most profitable quarters in its history in the last year. Sounds like they're doing pretty well without cloners. Someday, perhaps they'll have to deal with Monoply status. Then, perhaps, the answer may be 'cloning'. But at less than 5% worldwide market share, I think that's a little premature.
50% of Power Computing sales went to people who would otherwise have not bought any kind of Mac.
Yes, I've been inside a Mac Pro. And I've also been inside a 4400, which of course is the kind of machine that we were comparing with the clones at the time. And don't forget that the cloners were, because of the licensing system, using exactly the same motherboards (largely from the same manufacturers) as Apple. They were cheaply made... but so were the Apple's at the time.
I have 3 of them in this room and all still work fine. They are made the same way all Macs are made, with components from the best manufacturers. My PowerMacs came with Hitachi drives, Toshiba memory, and IBM PowerPC CPU's. The enclosure may not have been the greatest industrial design, but it's made very well. The PeeCee's at the time were far uglier. I also have a Color Classic on my desk. Still works fine, although slowly. It still makes me smile when I look at it.
What really 'saved' Apple wasn't so much the iMac (brilliant marketing though it was). The G3 chip was HUGE. I knew this from my PowerMac G3, which was a wonderfully designed computer, with a door on the side that was much like today's Mac Pro cases--even on the desktop, the whole unit unfolded on the desk so that you could get to any component. Perhaps you were referring to earlier machines, some of those were a bit harder to work with, but the ALL came with great components.
Sorry, Ian, but you can't re-write history so soon after it happened. Wait another decade or two and continue calling yourself a "pundit" and maybe someone will believe you.
While it is true that the Macs of that period weren't all the greatest, it doesn't mean that they weren't good and often beating the tar out of any PC box-stuffers. But that wasn't the problem with the cloners.
The problem is one that you admitted but don't even see. Apple gave licenses to companies to clone the Mac with the specific intention that they market to people not already in the Mac fold. Apple clearly stated this on several occasions but stupidly did not include such a clause in the license.
As a result, the cloners, like leeches on the Apple body, advertised and marketed directly to where they knew they could make money: not to the general computer market, but to the Apple Mac market. Magazines at that time directed toward Windows users ran few or no ads from the cloners while the Mac-oriented magazines were filled with them. MacWeek was awash with them. Since they did little or no R&D compared to Apple, they could undercut Apple's pricing with marginally better boxes.
Had Apple put into the licenses where the cloners could market, it would be likely that they and Apple as a result, would have been successful. But Apple didn't and the cloners went for the quick buck rather than for the more difficult conversion dollar.
"As a result, the cloners, like leeches on the Apple body, advertised and marketed directly to where they knew they could make money: not to the general computer market, but to the Apple Mac market."
Given that Apple was licensing them the mobo designs too, this is perhaps unsurprising. In fact, Apple refused to license designs (like Power's never-released portable) which deviated from their designs.
So work it out. Cloners had to sell essentially the same machines, running essentially the same software. How do you think they're going to compete?
"Since they did little or no R&D compared to Apple...."
Not true of Motorola, of course, but we'll let that one pass.
"...they could undercut Apple's pricing with marginally better boxes.:
In which case the licensing deal was underpaying Apple. Which, given Apple gave the licenses out in the first place, is whose fault exactly?
1. The cloners had to get their design tested & verified for compatibility by Apple before a motherboard design could be shipped. THAT was expensive for Apple.
2. Their MoBos were different from Apple's designs and often took marketshare from the high end.
However, in collaboration with (I think - memory on this is hazy) IBM, Apple created CHRP - the Common Hardware Reference Platform. This was a standardised system archiecture for PowerPC-based systems, effectively a set of ground rules to create motherboards. It specified things like using OpenFirmware - and in theory, any mobo designed to CHRP could, with the addition of the correct Mac ROM, run Mac OS.
That was the big danger point for Apple. If other manufacturers could build mobos without using Apple designs, they could build better mobos than Apple - at which point, Apple would have effectively begun the slide to being an OS vendor.
Unless, of course, it improved it's own machines...
Will it happen? No. Because the truth is, Jobs doesn't want to be Microsoft. He wants to be BETTER than Microsoft, and to do that market share is not the defining issue, but rather style, taste, and elegance.
Apple does not want to fill these niches. Other companies could, at no risk to Apple's market share."
Couldn't disagree more.
Apple knows that 'any' sale into the lower rung of the market will inevitably cannibalise a sale of the next rung up the spec ladder. Apple's whole business pivots on the basic assumption that you can convert a lower-end buyer ie. upsell, to the lowest rung of Apple's range 'and' make more money from that sale, if the value equation(included software, design etc) is good enough.
Just because Apple doesn't compete in the ultra low cost arena doesn't mean they shouldn't have any influence over those buyers. After all, if there is no dime a dozen machine and the buyer still wants an Apple, then they will save a little more and feel better about their purchase when they get it. The low end stuff just takes the shine off the high margin products.
Today is no different at all really.
That means, of course, that simply saying "they tried it once and look what happened" isn't a good argument. In fact, what it's basically saying that the Apple of today couldn't take on and beat a bunch of companies like Power. That, to me, seems crazy.
Then, as now, Apple received a ton of criticism because they didn't cater to the low end of the market. As several posters accurately remember, this was the market that the cloners were supposed to go after. It was the mantra of the new era of cloners. Finally, we'd see cheap Macs. But we didn't.
And we didn't see companies come along that ate Apple's lunch because they built wonderfully superior products. I had a PowerComputing machine. It was not an especially nice machine. It was the ugliest Mac I've ever had, by far; a generic case, standard components, no styling.
Why did I buy one? The same reason a lot of people did, and the same reason Apple cut them loose. They'd gone after the high end Mac market. That's where the highest margins were, and it was easiest to undercut Apple at those price points. They had no interest at all in the low-end market. Also, they were able to get faster chips than Apple. Remember? Apple needed to buy in larger quantities, and Motorola didn't make its fast chips in high enough quantities. So PowerComputing often managed to sell a faster machine at a slightly lower price. Apple lost a huge chunk of its high-end sales.
Plus there were more problems with instability. At least part of that problem was the proliferation of hardware types they had to test for. It's the one area I'll tip my hat to Microsoft about. They have to do a lot more hardware compatibility tests.
Those were very ugly times. Most of us who lived through it have no wish to see history repeat.
1) Nobody dropped Apple for that reason. Nobody.
2) Compared to the standards of Apple today, all computers back then really were crap.
3) Compared to the standards of Apple today, all other computers right now really are crap.
4) Compared to the standards of Apple today, whatever clones you hope to see really will be crap.
That's one of the things that turned Apple around. The machines are extremely high quality now. That why Apple and J. Ive have the record for number of Black Pencil design awards. These machines aren't just flash. There's great cleverness embodied in these designs. I can see why you might feel that this would be enough to protect them against clones in a way that it didn't in 1995. But you'll still be wrong if they open up those gates again.
There will be people who would have bought a Mac that will buy a clone instead. This much is certain. Who will that be? The cloners won't go after the markets you dream about for the exact same reason Apple doesn't: because they're small. Either in terms of margins, or in terms of percentage, they're small. Apple has found the sweet spots in their market. After a very short pause, they'll do exactly what PowerComputing did. They'll go after the high end, undercutting Apple by enough that people will turn a blind eye to the lower quality of the machine. When challenged, they'll re-cast the value proposition as "bang for the buck". Apple will lose high end sales, high end margins. These things WILL happen.
You appear to be saying that these losses will be offset but something else that will happen as well, like an expansion of the market. Each high end hardware sale lost would have to be offset by a LOT of software licenses. If Apple loses a $3000 sale and their margin at that price point is 33% (which is close to the mark, if memory serves), they have to sell how many licenses of Mac OS X to make up for that? Assuming they charged $100 per license and that we considered that $100 pure profit, the cloner would have to sell 10 machines non-cannibalizing sales for every 1 cannibalizing one. That’s the argument you have to make. And not only that, because it won't be $100, and it isn't pure profit, and they won't be growing the market by tenfold.
Now, which one would you think was the better machine? I'm hoping you'll agree that it would be the iMac! :)
And that's the difference between the Apple of 1996, pre-Jobs, and the Apple of today. Then, Apple really relied on two elements to differentiate it: the Mac OS (7), and to a lesser extent the performance of PowerPC compared to the Intel chips of the day. And unfortunately, it had headed down a few dead-ends in software which had hobbled the development of OS 7 (Copland, OpenDoc, the whole Taligent mess), and the PowerPC had proved to not quite be the powerhouse that everyone expected it to be. And, with a few honourable exceptions (like the "K2" case design), it's industrial design was not as great as it used to be.
Today, Jobs has addressed all those issues. OS X is leading the pack of operating systems in ease of use, aesthetics, and power. Performance is second to none. And industrial design... well, the countless awards no-doubt decorating Jonny Ive's office speak for themselves.
(BTW, I worked on MacUser UK for eight years, from 1995 to 2003, ending my time there as editor. And yes, I did give some machines a pretty bad review :) )
I have here a 6100, a 5500, a 7200, a 7500, a Color Classic, an iMac G3-400 graphite, and an eMac. all have worked perfectly to this day. That just about covers the 90's except for the pro machines (8600, 9600). Just what Macs are "crap"?
As usual, Ian, you just repeat what the Microsoft black-PR manual tells you to say.
I'll repeat again: I tested a lot of those machines. Compared to the Macs of today (and that's the important point here), they were crap.
Compared to the Macs of today, the Macs in 1995 were crap. And so were PCs. PCs have gotten better. Macs have gotten even better still. But still, I think the consensus back then was that Macs of the time were better than PCs of the time. We lost a lot of people to Win95 because not enough people believed that, to be sure. But it wasn't because of this equation
AbsoluteValue(Win95) > AbsoluteValue(Mac)
but rather this one
BangForTheBuck(Win95) > BangForTheBuck(Mac).
In every forum you can still see tons of people who think the second metric is the only one that counts. And they view the first metric as just being flash and glitter, only for suckers. Too few people will understand the value proposition you think they'll see. They'll look at
$$(Brand Name Mac) > $$(generic mac)
and then think
Mac == Mac
and
BangForTheBuck(Brand Name Mac) < BangForTheBuck(generic mac)
especially at the high end, and suddenly, the question will once again go to "Why'd you buy an _Apple_ Mac? What a sucker. I got one from Two Guys in a Basement, Inc. and it doesn't everything yours does, PLUS it's got a floppy. People still use those, you know." And next year, they'll be saying "Christ, I hate Macs. They crash all the time." They'll be deaf to people who tell them their Brand Name Mac doesn't crash like that. They'll still be angry at Apple for failing to do enough testing on their POS.
Which is why that $100 Apple might charge for a license doesn't count even as ($100 - TheCostOfPackaging). In allowing clones, Apple has to commit a lot more resources to testing these non-Apple designs.
Freudian slip :)
And that's what he's saying. I disagree with him, but I think you're being pretty unfair. I don't remember what machine I had right before my PowerComputing machine. I think it was a 5200 (one of the all-in-one things). I loved the little thing. (and you need to take the iMac out of your list, because that one belongs to the era Ian is complimenting, if I understand him). As much as I loved my 5200, I went nuts for the iMac. I normally buy computers at a certain interval. But the iMac was the first machine that ever made me break that cycle. I think I had a 6 month old machine, and I still bought an iMac the very first time I saw one.
Strictly speaking, what he's saying is true: compared to today's machines, the machines of the cloning-time were crap. My point is that it's not a worthwhile comparison. See my other posts, where I've already gone on at too much length. (Pause while I hearken back to the first time I ever saw the iMac. SUCH a thing of beauty. Bondy Blue, baby. I kinda miss the colors... but I have to admit that Bondy Blue was really the only one I ever flipped over. I never understood why they couldn't bring that color back. Oh well. I still own that iMac, and it still runs. Soooooo slow :) But I remember when we thought it was blazing fast)
We can agree to disagree. I understand what you're saying. To some extent, I think you're right. I just don't think enough people will see it your way. Too few people understand quality.
We can rejoice, however, that enough people DO understand quality to allow the Mac to survive and prosper.
But remember: only one company has survived by licensing their OS. Everyone else who has done it in the commodity market has failed. Apple is not eager to see if it can survive, after already once failing. Even if your reasoning is sound, they've got enough evidence to suggest it would harm them again, if they tried it again. And look at them now. They're absolutely thriving. They're firing on all cylinders. Why do you so fervently wish to seem them embark upon such a questionable distraction? It would greatly lengthen the time between releases of OS X, for instance, and that extra time wouldn't be in adding features but in testing all the different platforms. It would take more time, and there would STILL be more bugs.
And frankly, Macs just are as overly pricey as they once were. At a given price point, they're competitive. It's just that they don't exist at the lower price points. Like I say, though, Mac cloners historically didn't go after that price point, and I don't see any compelling reason to think they will. And if Apple tries to word the license that way, it'll get struck down in court (think about it a second), and everyone will then immediately pile up on the high end.
Also please observe how limited the computer product line is compared to the competition. Simplification is the rule----marginal products have no place in the Mac ecosystem.
Last point: in those lost Clone years Apple made (assembled) their own boxes. Not today. No cost disadvantage now given Far east contract manufacturing coupled with Apple's superb supply chain management and buying power.
For the record my wife and I own a 15" MB Pro, 24" iMac, G4 Tower, a dead PowerMac and a have veritable Mac Museum in the garage including a Mac Classic II—great machine for its time.
With respect, I think you're being disingenuous when you say the point of your article was not to put forward that Apple should consider re-evaluating a cloning program. If you are honestly only trying to point out that the Apple of today is significantly different than the Apple of 10 years ago, few people would have read your post and I doubt you would even have bothered to type it. I would imagine that it's as obvious to your readers as the weather.
Your point, made in bold, is that Apple lost market share due to the poor quality of their computers. It was this poor quality that caused customers to look elsewhere. Some of them found the equally poor quality clones. Finally, you conclude that since people where buying clones in order to avoid quality concerns from Apple hardware (a dubious conclusion, given the poor quality of the clones and Wintel boxes) and since Apple no longer has these quality concerns, then Apple would do well to reconsider licensing their OS.
The PCC boxes were so much like Wintel boxes that they were regularly reviewed as such <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1563/is_...>. The Umax boxes were worse. Radius tried that funky wavey front panel, which at least made it obvious that they weren't PC's. But as you probably know, all of them were painful to open and work on. All of them used the same logic board designs, whether or not they used the identical components. All of them were trying to compete with Apple on price while selling less than 10% of Apple's volume. And all of this while the PC's of the day were abhorrently unattractive, with their own - admittedly less proprietary - shoddy workmanship. In the crowd of computers from that era, Apple's really don't seem like they stand out as shoddy.
There are a lot of issues to harp on from 1995-1997. I wouldn't dig in your heals over the quality of the Apple line.
As an aside, Apple almost never demonstrated hardware that it wasn't ready to release within the next quarter. I bring this point up because Motorola and Power Computing regularly did. The StarMax 6000, as you know, was a CHRP box running the fast G3 chips coming off the press. I'm certain you know this, but it bears mentioning to readers who don't. When chips come off the press, their ability to clock up to higher speeds is not equal. Some are better than others, which allow them to be clocked up faster. The distribution of chips coming off the assembly line, then, looks a bit like a bell curve, with the majority of the chips unable to reach the speeds of the very fastest chips, who are in the small minority at the beginning of the curve. If all you have to do is put together a handful of demo units, then you can really pull out the stops and hand-pick a few high-end chips from that curve, stick them in a StarMax 6000 demo unit, and bring it to Macworld. If, on the other hand, you have to be ready to ship a few hundred thousand computers with these chips in them, that's obviously a different story. Power Computing was famous for releasing the very fastest chips in their computers about three months before Apple. But when they were only going to sell 100,000 computers this year, with the majority of those having low to mid range performance CPU's, they didn't have to wait very long to stockpile enough high end CPU's. Apple, who sold more computers in a month than PCC sold in a year, typically had to stockpile for, you guessed it, three months before they could announce their product.
Perhaps saying that the Apple machines of the time were crap was the wrong way to put it. As a range, and compared to today's machines, they obviously lack a lot. But you're right to say that by and large, the licensees weren't making machines that were better. They were, of course, making machines that were faster and cheaper. And your point about the StarMax 6000 (and others) is one that I've echoed myself elsewhere.
So perhaps a better way to put it would be this: The Apple machines of the clone era had little to recommend them in terms of design over a cheaper clone. Whereas today's Macs are exceptionally lovely looking, with very good design features which actually make them physically easier to use, the ones of the years around 1996 were, by and large, pretty dull beige boxes.
If there were Mac clones today, even cheaper and faster ones, I'd still buy Apple's machines - for the wonderful, deep design. I'd rather a 10% slower iMac than an ugly beige thing that I have to hide under a desk.
There were exceptions. The 5200 was, if not a great looking machine, at least a decent all-in-one. The 8600 had the classic K2 case design which geniunely made it much easier to get into.
But these machines were exceptions, not the rule. Today, it's hard to pick out a badly designed Apple computer. Then, it was hard to pick out a good one.
Of course, a lot of this is hindsight: the 5200 looked pretty good, but compared to even a first generation iMac it's a lot less impressive. But the qualities of a machine are often relative to what's around it. Where Apple's design ethos has improved beyond all recognition since then, its competitor's haven't.
Cheers!
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Mai...
Apple had always enjoyed a perception of superior quality and ease of use over the competition, going back to the very first Macintosh. By the time of the clones, the perceived gap between them and the competition had narrowed - Apple machines and their OS were, by and large, still superior, but they had lost their way, and they weren't getting better fast enough. You can short-hand this as "crap" if you like, but I'd consider "not LESS crap enough than the competition to justify the margins".
I used the first PowerMac (the 6100) from 1995, with the first compatible version of OS 7, and it was a crashfest. Later versions cleaned up the mess somewhat, but as a user, I might well have said "What?? This is a Mac! I paid a squizillion bucks for it, and it's CRASHING on me?? Screw this, I'll go back to Wintel."
By and large, early releases of System 7 - especially on the PPCs - were a dog's breakfast. 7.6.1 and 8.1 were much tidier, but by then the market perception damage has been done. Throw in some appallingly crippled motherboard designs - like the 5200 you cite above - headless chicken behaviour from R&D and marketing, and you had a growing perception that betting on the Mac platform was a loser's game, developers jumping ship, market share nose-diving, and stock plummeting to $14.
You're quite right that the situation today is different. If anything, it's the opposite. OS X and the Mac platform are high buzz, R&D and marketing act like they work for the same company and keep hitting home runs, developers are leaping into the fray, market share and stock keep on climbing. Apple have no need at all to re-open a licensing program, and they're hardly likely to do so just to be nice, or to go to war against Microsoft.
Apple won't license OSX for clones because from their perspective the OS is not a shrinkwrapped product to install on assembled hardware (the Windows model). Rather, they see it as the software half of the 'whole widget' Jobs always talks about. It is a rather subtle, non-technical distinction. The emphasis is on offering a perceived cohesive whole, and OSX on clones would disrupt that.
To effectively license OSX they'd also have to compete on hard technical merits and thinner margins, and lose the luxury mistique at the same time. They couldn't wait 3 months after everybody else to introduce a faster Intel CPU for example, for the cloners would do it as soon as possible, like they did in the PPC days. It's a lose-lose proposition for them, even if tech-minded people see it as desiderable since it's technically feasible.