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Mac Clones History: A Tale of Poor Margins and Bad Timing
The ’90s-era Mac clone program, Apple’s attempt to revive its fortunes during its lowest era, had the opposite effect. But hey, it could have worked in 1985.
— John C. Dvorak, the famed tech columnist, suggesting to The New York Times in 1994 (note our NYT linking policy) that the company’s just-announced agreement with Power Computing, a startup Mac manufacturer, might bite it in the butt. “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. As I noted in a 2019 piece about Hackintoshing, Jobs pitched Sony on the idea of putting Mac OS X on its Vaio desktops and laptops, essentially because he felt it was the only product line that matched what Apple was doing from a visual standpoint.
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