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From: philip@pescadero.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Mac Clones.. just wondering.
Message-ID: <1991Jan6.191758.3964@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 6 Jan 91 19:17:58 GMT
References: <53576@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
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Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
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In article <53576@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>, v067qklp@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Danielle T Mazzotta) writes:
|> Considering the success all the IBM-PC Clone makers have had over the past 
|> years, some friends and I were wondering why the same hasn't been done for the 
|> Macintosh series.  Is the hardware significantly more expensive for 
|> clone-makers to get a hold of, is the hardware more difficult to "emulate/copy" 
|> or is it political?

Here is something you might look out for. I recently saw a magazine with an
article about building your own Mac. (Sorry, I don't have the name - but it's
the sort of magazine you should find in a good electronics store: I saw the
magazin in Fry's Electronics.) The article was no doubt written before the
Classic appeared, because the author (who also happened to be selling some
of the needed parts) put the price of parts at $400 + plus a logic board
from any of the compact models (original, Plus, SE, SE/30). This meant you
could make a Plus-equivalent for about $700 - no great deal when you can
get a "real" Classic for the same price.

The key observation here is that "official" Apple parts are used wherever
there's a chance of suing for copyright/patent violation. This is exactly
what Apple did to someone who tried to produce a Plus clone. I don't know
why they bothered - I tried one of these machines, and it had a lot of
problems. Perhaps they simply wanted to frighten anyone else off the idea
of trying to reverse-engineer the Mac. By contrast, the original PC design
was very simple to reverse-engineer, and IBM didn't rush in with lawsuits
at the first sign of cloning.

Building a clone market based on "legal" logic boards is not feasible for
2 reasons: the price (even for reconditioned parts) of the boards is too
high, and the volume of such boards available is too low.
-- 
Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu