Wow, Apple’s OSX Dock Really *Is* That Annoying

I downloaded and ran, for kicks, a hack of Apple’s OSX that runs on vanilla Intel PCs, OSx86. It’s weird to think that now you can pretty effortlessly clone a Mac onto a PC. This hasn’t been possible for a long time, since at least 1997. Apple used to run a licencing program, but Steve Jobs shut it down in 1997 when he took over Apple again.

I recall that some people were buying some of the higher-end clones because they offered some advanced dual- and quad-CPU options (for example, DayStar Digital) that were unavailable or under-spec’d by Apple at that time. In many case, they were paying the same or more for these than extant retail for Apple kit.

I found a short clip of Jobs exerting the Reality Distortion Field wrt clone licences. Jobs derides their value, but this says they were a 7.25% royalty… low, but not “$50”, assuming an average of $2,000 retail for every Power Computing machine, some 50,000 generating $100m in sales.

All in all Jobs’ attitude presented quite a change from Apple’s earlier I Think We’re A Clone Now enthusiasm. Here’s another vintage video, a news extract describing Apple’s short-lived experiment with Macintosh licensing.

Under Jobs, Apple resorted to several strategies to squelch the Mac cloners. One cunning method was to rebrand OS 7.7 as OS 8, thereby voiding existing pricing deals and enabling Apple to reset terms that were more punitive. In the case of Power Computing, Apple paid $100m to buy the company outright, including all its IP, and thus shut down one of the more prominent cloners. Apple also got Power’s impressive direct ordering system modelled on Gateway/Dell , which enabled it to build out its apple.com sales channel.

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