(Untitled)

[shamusg]

I was having a LJ conversation with a friend about iTunes and Apple's desire to hold onto market share and it got me thinking. Why aren't there any Mac clones? Or G5 clones? There's a billion different PC clones out there, which has the upside of increasing the demand for PC based software. Now if there were more versions of macs, it'll drive

Comments

[tiepilot]

Apple won't release the OS to a clone company.

[samldanach]

During the big desktop boom, Apple and IBM chose different paths. Apple chose to go proprietary. The only place to get an Apple was from Apple. The upside, for the consumer, being that the OS could be maximized for the hardware, theoretically avoiding the bloatware of including every conceivable driver, and software to discover and handle every possible hardware configuration. Also, as you mentioned, quality control.

IBM, OTOH, chose to, effectively, open source their platform specs. They allowed other manufacturers to duplicate their architecture and BIOS. They partnered with Microsoft to leverage DOS in the market. IBM got a fairly small slice of the the IBM-clone market, but that market was huge. And, in the long run, market share and momentum won out.