Macintosh clone

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A Macintosh clone is a personal computer made by a manufacturer other than Apple Computer, using (or compatible with) Apple Macintosh ROMs and system software.

Contents 1 Background 2 Emulators 3 The first Macintosh clones 4 Official Macintosh clone program 5 Jobs ends the official program 6 Macintosh cloning today 6.1 Prospects for official Mac clones 6.2 Unsanctioned Intel Mac OS X clones today 7 Notes

[edit] Background

The Apple II and IBM PC computer lines were "cloned" by other manufacturers who had reverse-engineered the minimal amount of firmware in the computers' ROM chips and subsequently legally produced computers that would run the same software. These clones were seen by Apple as a threat, as Apple II sales had presumably suffered from the competition provided by Franklin Computer Corporation and other clone manufacturers, both legal and illegal. At IBM, the threat proved to be real: most of the market eventually went to cloners like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and dozens of smaller companies, and in short order IBM found it had lost control over its own platform. Undaunted by this setback, though, IBM soldiered on for years. The company's attempts to set standards were usually rejected by the market in favor of lower-cost technologies available from multiple vendors (for example, Micro Channel lost out to EISA and later to PCI). IBM finally found a nicely profitable niche with its highly-regarded Thinkpad portable computers, for which buyers were willing to pay a premium, but eventually the company decided to focus its efforts on business information services, and in 2005 IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo.

Wary of repeating history and wanting to retain tight control of its product, Apple's Macintosh strategy included technical and legal measures that rendered the production of Mac clones problematic. The original Macintosh system software was a very large amount of complex code that embodied the Mac's entire set of APIs, including the use of the GUI and file system. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, much of the system software was included in the Macintosh's physical ROM chips. Therefore, any competitor attempting to create a Macintosh clone would have to either illegally duplicate all the copyrighted code in the ROMs—in which case Apple could legally quash the manufacturer—or reverse-engineer the ROMs, which would have been an enormous and costly process without certainty of success. Only one company, Nutek, managed to produce "semi-Mac-compatible" computers in the early 1990s by partially re-implementing System 7 ROMs.^[1]

[edit] Emulators

Before true clones were available, the Atari ST could be converted into a Mac by adding the third-party Spectre GCR emulator, which required that the user purchase a set of Mac ROMs. The Amiga could also be converted into a Mac with similar emulators. Since Apple Computer never manufactured a 68060-based Mac, the fastest way to run native 68000 Mac OS applications on real hardware was to run it on an Atari or Amiga with a 68060 upgrade.

[edit] The first Macintosh clones

Apple's strategy of suppressing clone development was successful. From 1986 to 1991, several manufacturers created Macintosh clones; however, in order to do so legally, they had to obtain official ROMs by purchasing one of Apple's Macintosh computers, remove the required parts from the donor, and then install those parts in the clone's case. This resulted in very expensive, relatively unpopular clones. Apple could safely say that its share of the Macintosh computer market was not in danger.

A Brazilian company called Unitron is thought to have developed a Macintosh clone with 512KB of RAM and some custom chips made by National Semiconductor.^[2] The clone was not widely sold because Apple pressed the American government to create commercial sanctions preventing international sales of this computer. To this day it remains a mystery whether the Unitron Mac's ROMs were reverse-engineered or merely copied.^[3]

[edit] Official Macintosh clone program

By 1995, Apple Macintosh computers accounted for about 7% of the worldwide desktop computer market. Apple executives decided to launch an official clone program in order to expand Macintosh market penetration. Apple's clone program entailed the licensing of the Macintosh ROMs and system software to other manufacturers, each of which agreed to pay a royalty for each clone computer they sold. From early 1995 through mid-1997, it was possible to buy PowerPC-based clone computers running Mac OS, most notably from Power Computing. Other licensees were Motorola, Radius, APS Technologies, DayStar Digital, and UMAX. In terms of exterior styling, Mac clones often more closely resembled generic PCs than their Macintosh counterparts, but they frequently offered better performance at a lower price than true Macs.

[edit] Jobs ends the official program

Soon after Steve Jobs' return to Apple, he attempted to re-negotiate the clone manufacturers' license agreements to raise Apple's royalty. Jobs proposed to raise the per-computer royalty by an amount that would render all the clones unable to compete on price. When the clone makers refused, Jobs in turn refused to license later versions of Apple hardware and operating system software to the clone vendors. The initial OS license was valid only for the 7.x series of the Mac OS; at the time these contracts were signed, Mac OS 8.0 was expected to be the next-generation Copland OS. Jobs exploited this loophole by declaring the imminent version of the Mac OS (which would otherwise have been numbered something like 7.7) to be 8.0, leaving the clone manufacturers without the ability to ship a current Mac OS version and effectively ending the cloning program.

Jobs publicly stated that the program was ill-conceived and had been a result of "institutional guilt," meaning that for years, there had been a widely held belief at Apple that had the company aggressively pursued a legal cloning program early in the history of the Macintosh, consumers might have turned to low-priced Macintosh clones rather than low-priced IBM/PC-compatible computers. Had it pursued a clone program in the 1980s, in this view, Apple might have ended up in the position currently occupied by Microsoft—an extremely powerful company with high profit margins and a wide base of consumers perpetually dependent on its system software products. Jobs claimed it was now too late for this to happen: the Mac clone program was doomed to failure from the start, and since Apple made money primarily by selling computer hardware, it ought not engage in a licensing program that would reduce its hardware sales.

The press was not kind. Many editorial accounts characterize the end of the Mac clone as a completely deliberate and malicious act on the part of Apple or Steve Jobs.^{[Please name specific person or group]} At best, it is usually seen as a harsh but necessary step.^{[Please name specific person or group]}

There is some evidence that the ending of the cloning program caused ongoing friction between Apple and Motorola, who was not only a clone licensee but also one of two sources for the PowerPC processors used in the Macintosh.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Macintosh cloning today

[edit] Prospects for official Mac clones

Since Apple transitioned the Macintosh to an Intel platform in 2006, and subsequent to a major increase in visibility (if not in computer market share) for Apple with the success of the iPod, large computer system manufacturers such as Dell have expressed renewed interest in creating Macintosh clones. Mac OS X is currently widely perceived to be free of the viruses and other security threats that afflict computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems, and also includes consumer-oriented "lifestyle" software (such as the iLife suite) that is thought to be attractive to home users. While various industry executives have stated publicly in 2006 that they would like to sell Macintosh-compatible computers, Apple VP Phil Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.^[4]

[edit] Unsanctioned Intel Mac OS X clones today

Since Apple has moved to a hardware platform differing only very slightly from that of a standard x86-based PC, many of the roadblocks preventing production of unsanctioned Macintosh clones have been removed. An active hacking community has begun producing versions of Mac OS X for Intel with various anti-cloning protections disabled. Using these unofficial versions of Mac OS X, it is relatively straightforward to install the operating system on a generic PC.

Given the ready availability of generic PCs and versions of OS X that will run on them, illegal production and sale of Macintosh clones by small system vendors is effectively a foregone conclusion. On May 10, 2006, the first Intel Macintosh clones were revealed to have been produced by ReDPCs.com.^[5] While the small Asian vendor marketed its clone under the name "PowerMac G6", the computer was actually an ordinary Pentium 4-based PC running a hacked version of Mac OS X 10.4.3, which was the first official release of Mac OS X to have had its anti-cloning protections bypassed. It is unclear if a buyer of this model would be able to update their OS to future versions of OS X such as 10.4.8 in the same way they would on a normal Mac, if at all.

[edit] Notes