![]() ![]() I had a brief dabble with Hackintoshes a few years ago, but ultimately I’ve found myself trying to make my computing life simpler and more robust even at the expense of some power and flexibility-just like Apple has. I never owned a clone at the time I was too in thrall of Apple, and had a Power Macintosh 4400-itself the most PC-like box Apple ever made-and later a refurb G4 Cube around the few years the clones were made. I know plenty of people who bought clones as their first “Mac” because they were cheap and powerful, and where Apple itself tried to tempt PC switchers-with their existing ecosystem of peripherals-with it’s “bring your own keyboard, mouse and display” marketing line for the Mac mini, here you can easily imagine a PC user making the jump to Mac and just plugging everything into the StarMax, no problems. I carefully removed the VGA and VGA to Mini DisplayPort adapters I’d been using with it on a Mac mini recently, and then spent more seconds than I care to admit frowning in confusion as I tried to connect the monitor to the StarMax. A Apple Studio Display, which had a DA–15 connector, to use in the photo above. Of course, real Macs still had that indefinable edge, that air of finesse and polish that has always made Apple products as special, and it’s funny, especially given the context of trying to do for the Mac market what licensing had done for the PC market, how the Motorola Starmax 3000/240 DT I have feels so much like a stack-’em-high-sell’em-cheap PC.įurther down, the video port is also a PC-standard VGA plug rather than the DA–15 variant Apple typically used at this point, something I’d forgotten as I proudly unearthed my And as he points out, Motorola wouldn’t have had any problem making the chips at scale, so this machine in particular was a looming and potent threat to Apple’s core business. ![]() Tells this tale on his site, and I remember the cover of the magazine in which it was supposed to feature-a scribbled-on proof of the cover that had been going to run, noting that the clone program was cancelled. Mac magazines even had them in their labs for benchmarking my old boss Indeed, Apple scrapped the clone program just weeks before this machine, the StarMax 6000, was due to be released. Motorola was a particularly interesting case, since it nearly introduced a “Mac” powered by the hugely exciting new G3 processor before Apple did. Indeed, because of the nature of chip manufacture meant that new chips tended merely to trickle out to begin with-and so a company of Apple’s scale would have to wait before sufficient volume had been produced to meet initial demand-a smaller company could nip in and grab a few thousand CPUs from the initial runs which would easily satisfy its smaller customer base, so it wasn’t unusual for Mac clones to have newer, faster chips than actual Macs made by Apple. Apple was a hardware company, and by allowing other companies to compete with its own hardware, there was always a fundamental tension.īut the clone makers weren’t stupid, and they often focussed their efforts on precisely the same market. Apple may have hoped its licensees would introduce cheap, entry-level computers to swell the ranks of those using its platform and thus shore up its future, leaving it to service the lucrative high-end customers (to which, additionally, these new acolytes might ultimate graduate). Microsoft was basically solely a software company, so there was no downside to it to spreading support for its OS standard as widely as possible, but Apple was a hardware company, and by allowing other companies to compete head-on with its own hardware, there was always, shall we say, a fundamental tension in the clone program. ![]() Problem was, it wasn’t-ahahaha-an apples-and-apples comparison. ![]()
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