Far from being dead, a surprising number of Macintosh cloners are still in business. With the withdrawal of both IBM and Motorola, it was expected that the companies that relied on them for a licence would also withdraw from the Mac market, especially since companies with Motorola sub-licences also relied on Motorola for motherboards for their computers.
Far from going under, companies like PowerTools are in fact finding new partners and planning their "new years eve party for 2000". To further this aim, PowerTools have started shipping the first Mac Compatible to use the G3 "Arthur" chip.
So how does a company manage to ship a fully certified G3 computer when Apple refuses to even consider certifying computers with these chips, and still keep their MacOS 8 license? Well according to a letter from Victor Wong, CEO of PowerTools what you do is take an Apple certified UMAX motherboard, add a 750 upgrade card (something that does not require Apple certification) and bingo, the fastest Mac system available, the PowerTools X-factor. (It of course helps if you are the only clone maker who agrees with Apples current clone policies, and is said to be personally liked by the almighty Steve Jobs).
An interesting snippet from this letter is the fact that the former Motorola dependent PowerTools, a company that used to use Motorola motherboards, is now using UMAX motherboards. This leads to the interesting conclusion that UMAX is possibly acting as a Motorola replacement for clone companies, providing them with motherboard designs upon which they can improve for their own computers. This is good as the original Apple motherboard designs most were using are reaching the end of usefulness, and clone companies are in need of new designs. Buying them from other companies makes for cheaper clones, as well as greater compatibility.
The Sydney Morning Herald's story Cloning alive and well list other companies that are still in cloning, including a couple of German cloners as well as two unnamed British companies (the one expanding into the US sounds like Computer Warehouse, but I have no confirmation of this).
This is all good news, as Apple is finding it hard to keep up with orders as it is. Apple has been forced to stop taking orders for its top of the line, PowerMac 9600/350. This is due to an inability of IBM and Motorola to produce enough of the 350MHz 604 chips Apple is using in this system. This leaves the PowerMac 9600/300 as Apples top of the line computer, at least until November, when Apple is rumoured to release its own line of G3 powered computers. This leaves the X-Factor as far and away the fastest of the shipping computers.
Go To Page: 1 2
