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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>) 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.<\/p>\n I found a short clip of Jobs exerting the Reality Distortion Field wrt clone licences<\/a>. Jobs derides their value, but this says they were a 7.25% royalty<\/a>… low, but not “$50”, assuming an average of $2,000 retail for every Power Computing machine, some 50,000 generating $100m in sales.<\/p>\n All in all Jobs’ attitude presented quite a change from Apple’s earlier I Think We’re A Clone Now<\/a> enthusiasm. Here’s another vintage video, a news extract describing Apple’s short-lived experiment with Macintosh licensing<\/a>.<\/p>\n