Funhouse Mirror Macs

Before there were legit Mac clones, there were, shall we say, less legit ones

For most of the Mac’s history, you could only really get one from Apple if you wanted to go completely by the book, above-board. Sure, there were less-legit ways, and plenty of people were willing to try them. But there was a short period, roughly about 36 months, where it was possible to get a licensed Mac that had the blessing from the team in Cupertino.

But it wasn’t for a lack of trying outside of those 36 months. For example, a Brazilian company named Unitron sold a direct clone of the Macintosh 512K, which fell off the market only after a Brazilian trade body intervened.

Later, some enterprising Amiga and Atari ST fans took advantage of the fact that their systems used similar chipsets to the Macintosh, which allowed them to effectively work like a Macintosh if you had access to the right ROM chip. Atari fans had the Magic Sac or the Spectre adapters; Amiga users could add the A-Max to recreate a Mac’s capabilities. And even as these platforms faltered on the market, solutions kept emerging. During the PowerPC era, at a time when the Amiga-like MorphOS first hit the Mac-compatible market, an Amiga hardware solution called iFusion promised to let Amiga diehards run PowerPC-compatible Mac software.

“The beauty of the latest Power Macs, however, is that they no longer require a hardware ROM good news for Amiga owners, as it has taken virtually all the hassle out of setting up an emulator,” a 2001 Amiga Active piece pledged.

But despite claims that the Atari ST’s ROM-based approaches were technically legal, it’s not like any of this stuff was explicitly allowed by Apple. One letter-writer to Infoworld noted their excitement about the Magic Sac, only for the editors of the magazine to remind readers that Apple wasn’t down with it. “Apple continually reaffirms its intention to protect its ROM and to prevent the cloning of the Mac,” the curt note states.

As utterly bizarre as some of this stuff is, some of the Mac variants came in the form of full-on Mac conversions. These took the hardware of an existing Mac, rejiggered its many parts, and created an entirely new product. There are many examples of this throughout Apple’s history—the most recent of which being the various models of the ModBook, a pre-iPad Mac tablet—but patient zero was Chuck Colby.

Colby, an early PC clone-maker who was friends with Apple team members like Steve Wozniak, was already offering a portable Mac conversion called the MacColby at the first MacWorld conference.

Per Colby, Apple CEO John Sculley bought two MacColbys after the event, but never paid for them. Despite the setback, he kept building new conversions, with one of the most notable being the Walkmac, which filled the portable Mac gap in the years before the Macintosh Portable hit the market. Later, he even developed the first Mac tablet, called the Colby Classmate.

Despite being unusual—if your average laptop can be thought of as a computer sandwich, the Walkmac is best described as a computer panini—they had a significant niche audience. A 2013 CNET piece notes that the Grateful Dead and Peter Jennings were customers, and that Apple would actually send Colby referrals in its pre-Powerbook days.

So, why did Colby get the red-carpet treatment while other clone-makers were facing lawsuits and police raids? Easy: He was either selling DIY conversion kits as an aftermarket product, or having his company do the conversion, making it legit in Apple’s eyes. (You still needed a Mac to do the surgery.) There is actually a video on YouTube describing the MacColby conversion process, which a person with connections to Colby’s estate was able to rip from Betamax a few years ago.

One has to wonder: Would Apple have been better off just giving Chuck Colby, or any other interested party, a license to make their own clones? After all, it’s not like Colby’s ultra-niche portables were going to compete with Apple’s experience. Right?

During the 1980s, this argument was basically a nonstarter—the company even went so far as to change its dealer policy to limit the resale of its system ROMs for non-repair purposes. But as leadership shifted, so too did Apple’s thinking.

It just needed the right entrepreneur to knock on their door.

The moment Apple’s anti-clone resolve began to waver

NuTek wanted a piece of the Mac market so badly that it was willing to reverse-engineer its own chipset. The company, like Apple, was based in Cupertino. It was talking up its plans for years.

“Nutek will do for Mac users what the first IBM-compatible developers did in the early 1980s: open up the market to increased innovation and competition by enabling major independent third-party manufacture,” explained Benjamin Chou, the company’s CEO, in a 1991 ComputerWorld piece.

And by 1993, it had built a “good enough” analogue of the Mac that could run most, but not all, Mac programs. “We’ve tested the top 15 software applications and 13 of those worked,” Chou told InfoWorld, an impressive boast until you hear the non-working apps are Microsoft Works and Excel. The effort sounded impressive—it even sold a model called the Duet, which was both a PC and a Mac—but in the end, it reinforced the party line about clones—they couldn’t get you all of the way there.

But NuTek’s efforts nonetheless highlighted a thaw in Apple’s thinking. A 1991 MacWorld piece on NuTek’s reverse engineering attempt quoted Apple Chief Operating Officer Michael Spindler as saying, “It is not a question of whether Apple will license its operating system, but how it will do this.”

With Windows making real inroads, Apple was ready to bend.

In 1992, Apple had very serious talks with Novell about bringing MacOS to the IBM PC, only abandoning the work after it became clear Microsoft was just too dominant in the PC market. In 1993, Spindler became Apple’s CEO and killed the Novell experiment—but he was still open to the idea of licensing MacOS.

Apple just needed the right partner—and at first, Stephen Kahng’s Power Computing fit the bill. Kahng was a veteran of the clone wars—his prior company, Leading Edge, had earned a surprising foothold in the PC market, and he wanted to repeat that feat on the Mac side of things. But he was also approachable, and had a noted streak of frugality, which made him a favorite of magazine profiles. And his new firm, Power Computing, was offering an inroad for Apple to potentially score similar success.

A Computer Chronicles episode on the Mac clones.

And so, in the waning days of 1994, just before the annual MacWorld conference, the news hit the wires: Apple was getting an authorized clone-maker. It turns out that NuTek did this the hard way. They just had to wait for the right CEO to take over, then ask nicely. That’s what Power Computing did, and they earned a straight-on deal with Apple.

But despite the potential of the idea looking rosy, some saw some dark clouds over the whole thing. A PC Magazine analysis from early 1995 perhaps put the biggest frowny-face on the story:

Apple’s decision to create a clone market may or may not be successful, but it didn’t really have a choice. At the recent MacWorld conference, one of the most popular technical seminars was given by Microsoft. It covered how Mac programmers can learn to write Windows applications.

One can see why Apple might have been attracted to this model, in retrospect. The company was a bit lost in the market at the time, and needed a strategy to expand its shrinking base beyond the niche audiences where it generally played.

But the clone market did not expand its base. Instead, it invited a price war.

Why the whole licensed Mac clone thing didn’t work

In 1985, when dudes like Chuck Colby were inventing new kinds of Macs, that was perhaps the ripest time for Apple to launch a clone program. The concept of a Mac was new, and the form factor was unique enough that people were buying it for that, not just because of the operating system it ran.

But a decade later, with 30 years of hindsight, it’s clear that 1995 wasn’t the right time for the idea. The reason is simple: It put a mirror against Apple’s own offerings, which attempted to hit every possible market segment. And the reflection didn’t look particularly great.

That year alone, the company sold 47 distinct models of Mac—each with its own different specs and market segments—according to EveryMac. (In the modern day, with few exceptions, it releases about half that many model variants in a given year.) It was still selling 68000 processor variants to schools and PowerPC models to everyone else.

And it quickly became clear that allowing Power Computing and other clone-makers in the house was undermining the value proposition for much of the Mac lineup. In the pre-iMac era, Macs simply didn’t have enough of a “wow factor” driving the industrial design. It made the Mac about the software, not the hardware. Plus, from a protecting-the-margins standpoint, it was simply a bad idea.

When Chuck Colby sold a kit to put a Mac in a new kind of case, or put a Mac motherboard in a new chassis, Apple kept its high margins. But Power Computing’s beige boxes not only ate into Apple’s market share, but the MacOS-makers also got a far smaller cut.

There likely was a magic point at which Power Computing’s scale and the increased audience size would have made up for the loss in hardware revenue, but this was the era of Windows 95. Apple needed a partner that would go toe-to-toe with Packard Bell. Instead, these cut-rate Macs were preaching to the already converted, and undercutting Apple along the way.

And Apple only truly figured this part out after Steve Jobs returned to the fold. Jobs, in the midst of trying to fix this situation in his overly passionate way, might have harmed the evolution of the PowerPC chip in the process. As a 1998 piece from the Wall Street Journal puts it:

The cloning issue also led to a fierce argument with Motorola CEO Christopher Galvin. Mr. Galvin won’t discuss it, but according to two Motorola people, he erupted when Mr. Jobs, in a telephone conversation, tried to strike a bargain: granting Motorola the right to continue cloning in return for a promise to speed up development of microprocessors crucial to Apple’s laptop business. Mr. Jobs erupted right back. Motorola later took a $95 million charge to shut down cloning.

Motorola continues as a chip supplier to the company, but officials say they will no longer go the extra mile for Apple. “They will be just another customer,” one says.

(Motorola later left the alliance that built the PowerPC chips, spinning it off into another company.)

Power Computing—which had an apparent $500 million in revenue in 1996 alone—got a somewhat softer landing, though not one without its share of drama. Apple had pushed the company to agree to a new licensing deal even before Jobs took over as CEO, and once he did, it was clear the companies would not see eye to eye. The company’s then-president, Joel Kocher, attempted to take the battle to MacWorld, where he attempted to force a public confrontation over the issue. The board disagreed with Kocher’s actions, Kocher quit, and ultimately the company sold most of its assets to Apple for $100 million, effectively killing the market entirely.

(One under-appreciated element of the deal: Power Computing had innovated with a Web-based “configurator,” an approach Apple did not introduce for its own machines until after the sale. Perhaps it had an effect?)

The only clone-maker that Apple seemed willing to play ball with was the company UMAX. The reason? Its SuperMac line had figured out a way to hit the low-end market, an area Apple has famously struggled to hit. Apple wanted UMAX to focus on the sub-$1,000 market, especially in parts of the world where Apple lacks a foothold. But UMAX didn’t want the low-end if it couldn’t keep a foothold in the more lucrative high end, and it chose to dip out on its own. (Perhaps that gave the iMac an opening.)

Jobs didn’t like this market, and the finances of it just didn’t make any damn sense, especially when the major manufacturers were just cannibalizing the company whose operating system and chip partnership had enabled the market in the first place. It highlights the ultimate problems with cloning—a loss of control, and a lack of alignment between licensor and licensee.

“I would guess that somewhere around 99 percent of their sales went to the existing customer base,” then-CFO Fred Anderson told Wired in 1997.

So Apple restricted the licenses, making it so these System 7 clones, for the most part, were restricted from upgrading to Mac OS 8 (though it was more than possible, per Low End Mac). It did the trick—and starved the clone-makers out.

If Apple wasn’t already making nearly 50 types of computers each year, the model would have made a lot more sense. In the end, the timing just looked all wrong.