Submitted by “One of the less well known Mac clones, the MaxxBoxx was released in Germany in July 1997 to fill the needs of users with very demanding applications. In a stunning enclosure, the MaxxBoxx was easy to open and upgrade. The machine was built into a cube that was twice as wide as an ordinary mini tower with room for up to ten drives.” There’s more on old Macs: Sonnet has announced new CPU upgrades for G4 PowerMacs and Xserves.
I think that should be changed to at lest 1997, because 1987, there were no CPU:s at that speed available.
Even thou I am a Mac fan I really think Apple should have allowed some of the better (and different niche) Mac cloners continue.
I think it was pretty sad (and bordering on illegal) to just cancel their Mac license. Its a pity that BE never took off and allowed machines like this to prosper. When Apple took back the license so many good Mac clones disappear
Apple clones were increasing Apple’s share of the market, and the companies were innovating and making faster/better machines.
Apple should have simply made part of the OS license that Apple had the rights to license back at low cost any computer designs that the OEMS developed.
That way, Apple could have come out with high end machines that had lots of power and expandability and left the low end of the market to the cloners.
After terminating Power Computing and Motorola’s MacOS Licenses, it took over a year for Apple to release systems that were as fast as their licensee’s systems.
I still have my PowerCenter 132 (upgraded to a 604e 225) and love it.
When you have to scroll down past two screens of advertising to actually FIND the text of the article at 1024×768, that’s BAD web design.
On the subject of the article itself – When is apple going to pull it’s head out of it’s ass and stop MAKING hardware, and let people with a CLUE do it?
Seriously, whenever I hear people touting how wonderful the quality of Apple hardware is, I get that ‘packard bell’ twitch, ESPECIALLY in light of machines as well made as the MaxxBoxx were.
Mage66 – Your comment misses the problem; the clone makers were making faster machines that were cheaper or at least the same cost – which is EXACTLY what would happen if the clone manufacturers were allowed to make OSX boxes. Sure, you might not get the same artsy ikea-like form factor, but for the cost of the cheapest Mac Mini you can build a MicroATX Pentium D that on performance could break even with the 24″ iMac, and on accessories (like optical drive, hard drive, display, memory) blows it out of the water.
deathshadow,
We pride ourselves on a site design that works even on a 640 x 480 display. The article begins on the first screen on every browser I’ve tested – including IE6 on WinXP, Safari and the Mozillas on my Mac, and Firefox and Konqueror on Linux. Yes, there are always some problems with Internet Explorer, but perhaps the problem you’re seeing has to do with your browser, not the site’s design…
Details of your setup might help us see the problem you mention, but none of my browsers exhibit this behavior.
Daniel Jansen, associate editor, Low End Mac
I can confirm the problem with the site — the “Low End Mac Reader Specials” box is in the center of the page instead of being in the right hand column. (Opera 9.02/XP)
>> Details of your setup might help us see the problem you mention, but none of my browsers exhibit this behavior.
Opera 8.5 on a laptop, Opera 9.01 and 9.02 beta also /fail/ hard on your layout. In addition the text overflows it’s containers when windows is set to ‘large fonts (120dpi)’ on both IE and FF on the side bars, and under linux when it’s set to 100dpi in Konqueror (since Gecko ignores host DPI settings on linux, it’s not an issue there)
Took a quick glance at the source, the attempts at closing SPAN’s that don’t exist, inline level elements wrapping block level ones, and endless use of deprecated html that is NOT XHTML 1.0 tranny compliant (which is pretty obvious if you try validating the page) could all be contributing factors.
Yeah, this spells it out right here:
span class=”rightimgborder”
after which you open a iframe, then a div. Span is a inline level container – even if you force it to block you are NOT supposed to put block level elements like IFRAMES and DIV’s inside it.
/FAIL/ at intarnet. (no, that’s not a typo)
Thanks for taking the time to share your findings. It helps explain why only 2% of our visitors are using Opera. And thanks for pointing out the cause of the problems. We’ve done some work on our code, and it now works great in Opera. And looks fine in Konqueor with Ubuntu 6.
Booting Windows – shudder – where it *almost* works in IE 6. There is a problem where it won’t scroll past the ad bar on the left unless the body of the article is longer than that – and then it won’t show additional links, our footer, etc. A problem for another time and place…
We do our best to make our pages XHTML compliant (at least at the transitional level), but we have no control over the code used to display the ads, which is where 90% or more of our noncompliance occurs.
Thanks again for helping us find and solve this bug.
Daniel Jansen, LowEndMac.com
The problem was, they tried the wrong thing. Licensing other people to make Macs was never going to either work commercially for them or expand the market. It just guaranteed destructive (to Apple) price competition for the existing market. It showed that Apple buyers are no different from anyone else, that they buy something better and cheaper if they can. But that is all.
Well, it also showed that the then regime in Cupertino was gutless as well as clueless.
The real alternative strategy was split the company into two divisions, a hardware and a software division. Then let the software division sell the OS to anyone who would buy it. And force the hardware division to either go bust or get the costs out and compete. And let the hardware division make and sell hardware with any OS it felt like.
How it would have worked out, who knows? It might have expanded their total market and widened the appeal of MacOS. Or not.
However, this is what people who think that they should sell the OS to run on non-Apple hardware are advocating, and it is not a counter argument to this that the clones episode, which was not this at all, ended in failure.
Edited 2006-09-13 07:08
Allowing a third party to create clones means lost sales, but even worse, it means having to deal with support calls and bad reputation if anything goes wrong with the clones. Such was tried with the pc: When IBM opened up the architecture, they opened a market for cheap and powerful devices, but compatibility was lost.
If one wants to build a Joe User compatible computer (as Apple did with the Mac), why not *avoid* legal trouble? There’s lots of good hardware on the market. By using a fixed architecture, one avoids hardware problems. For the software, take Linux or BSD or any other free OS. You won’t get into legal trouble, there are no license fees, there’s already a lot of software for these systems, and there won’t be driver problems due to fixed hardware.
(Note: that would be different from slapping e.g. Debian on a $300 pc and selling it as a “pc with Debian pre-installed”. That’s the same difference as between a MacBook Pro and a “notebook with Darwin and some software pre-installed”.)
Apple fans can upgrade a Power mac to 1.8ghz for $600. With the new mini coming in at the same price, I wonder how many consumers will opt for that?
I got one of those myself. It’s a yeongyang cube case, so it’s not MaxxBoxx specific. I have an old dual P3 in there, it’s just an ATX case…
I can’t find that exact model (the YY-0210 iirc), but you can find the later versions on http://www.yeongyang.com/
Nice case. Bit noisy, but very roomy.