OSNews

That's an old Myth.

It's NOT true.

Each Cloner was paying a license to Apple. Each Cloner through it's sales was expanding the Macintosh Market. Apple's Marketshare EXPANDED when they had Licensed cloners.

Why they were shut down, was because they were eating Apple's Lunch.

They were producing BETTER Macs, cheaper.

After shutting down the last cloner, Motorola. It took Apple over a year to produce a Power Mac that beat the performance of the High End Power Towers and StarMax systems.

This was NOT about Money. Apple was making money on EVERY sale of a clone, and not incurring ANY cost.

And making more money as the expanded base bought MacOS Upgrades. My Power Computing PowerCenter 132 came with MacOS 7.5.2, I bought MacOS 7.6 through 9.0 for it as they came out.

Apple made money every time.

And if that computer could run MacOS X, I'd have bought a copy of THAT for it too.

Microsoft is NOT a Computer Company, and they are the pretty darn successfull, with decent margins.

Apple has never learned the Free Market adage of making less profits on MORE unit sales. They prefer to have high margins on low unit sales. OK.

Just don't lie and say clones were killing Apple.

Apple was killing Apple by not licensing back their better Power Mac Designs, or competing with the cloners on the open market.

Their idea of winning the competition was sinking all the competitors by pulling their license.

We have less advanced Macs than we might have, thanks to that.

Cloners would have pushed Motorola and IBM (not to mention that Processor Company Apple bought shares in and shut down), to come out with faster processors.

We might easily have PPC Chips as fast as Intel, if we had manufacturers to sell them, and push for their development.