Mac Clones History: A Tale of Poor Margins and Bad Timing

Summary

Today in Tedium: Imagine my shock recently when I realized that, I—the guy who has covered Apple-specific angles as esoteric as Novell’s attempt to bring MacOS to the PC—have never written a full story about Mac clones. My archive is packed with pieces about Hackintoshes, weird side-tales about coulda-been Apple contenders, even a piece on Apple II clones. But not even one Mac piece about a third-party Mac market. That ends today, as in retrospect, it is a clear parable about brand identity and how quickly it can be lost. Today’s Tedium talks about Apple’s belated attempt to embrace clones, and the guy who sold Spindler on the idea. — Ernie @ Tedium$1,063The amount that someone paid for the Akkord Technology Jonathan, a late-’80s reverse-engineering of the Mac Plus, on an online auction platform. The device never made it to market after the company was sued by Apple, which accused the Taiwanese company of stealing proprietary data from its ROM chips, culminating in a police raid.The Unitron 512 was one of the first Mac clones ever made, and it came from Brazil. (via Chester’s Blog)Before there were legit Mac clones, there were, shall we say, less legit onesFor 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 ...