I hadn’t realised that Apple was licensing Mac OS into the PowerPC era. It turns out that the idea of building market share was felt to be more of a threat, so after Jobs returned, the license fees were raised enough to force the licensees to quit.
via Asianometry’s video Why the Original Apple Silicon Failed
In a 1996 newspaper clipping we read of the PowerTower from Power Computing
Power Computing Corp., the first maker of Apple Macintosh clones, has begun selling a model with the fastest microprocessor available… run by a new PowerPC 604e microprocessor from a joint venture of IBM, Apple and Motorola. The chip has clock speeds of up to 225 MHz, faster than the top 200 MHz speed of Intel Corp.'s Pentium chip, the brand found in most PCs.
There was even kind of a successor to this: the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP), a standardized platform for PowerPC based systems, joined by IBM and Apple in 1995, which never saw wide adoption. Apple planned a release of System 8 for this and even went through a number of pre-release versions of this, but this never saw public light of day.
Compare this recently released YT-video:
(Wikipedia, see the text link above, lists a few links to the CHRP standard, but these are all PostScript files, so they may not be easily viewable on modern systems. We may need a common conversion effort to preserve documentation only available in PostScript.)
PS: I think this also sheds some light on the end of the Mac-clone program, which may have been more complex than just Apple vs. Clone vendors, and may even mix with the history of Pink/Taligent (Apple’s and IBM’s joint effort for a modern OS, which lived on in some membra disiecta, like OpenDoc or OpenTransport, i.e., the entire family of “Open…” system extensions). With things first moving on to CHRP and this new platform eventually stalling, the PowerPC platform per se may have been put into question. (Notably, Apple experimented with a number of systems based on other processors.) So, the support of a platform that was essentially tied to System 7.5/7.6 was kind of problematic, as it became more and more unclear, what the direction into the future may actually be, And maintaining a shared platform, which was more oriented to the past, on a contractual basis, may not have been that attractive, especially, given that System 7/8 was already becoming more of a dead end.
(Mind that Apple’s contemporary effort for a new OS, Raphsody, was meant to support the Intel platform, as well, just like NeXT/OpenStep did. So current programs that were oriented into the future, still comprised a shared and open hardware platform – and also left the door open to a switch of processors.)
When Be saw the introduction of PowerPC Mac clones it pivoted to a software-only company dropping its own BeBox (NeXT had done the same in favor of 486 PCs - the conventional wisdom at the time was that you wanted to be Intel or Microsoft, not IBM or Dell). When Jobs cancelled licensing to clones (I see a lot of people claiming he did that be raising prices, but my own memory was that he simply didn’t update contracts so cloners were stuck with older versions of the OS) this left Be without machines to run on, but Intel gave them money to port to x86 PCs. After they did so they found out OEMs couldn’t install BeOS even if Be gave it away or they would lose their “discounts” on Windows.
Right: according to John Siracua’s 2008 article “Rhapsody and blues”, enticing third parties to release cross-platform Cocoa apps was a central part, maybe the central part of Jobs’ original strategy for the Mac when he returned to Apple. (Of course this bears a resemblance to NeXT Software, Inc.'s business strategy.) The failure of that plan apparently left significant bad blood between Apple and Adobe, even if the world at large barely noticed its coming or going and many later writers on Apple and Jobs hardly seem to have noticed it either.
Thanks for talking about this. I’ve wondered about that ever since I heard about OpenStep, the open source version of NextStep, which became Cocoa. It seemed like this Obj-C library that just hung out there with nothing supporting it, and I wondered what the point was. It got me thinking that it must’ve been the intent of NeXT to make it so Obj-C could be used for writing apps on other platforms, perhaps compatible with Cocoa on the Mac, but I haven’t seen any examples of that happening. When I finally looked into programming on my Mac, and I started paying a little attention to the differences between OS X and iOS, I started realizing that Apple had a completely distinct development stack that was Apple-only. The skillset wasn’t very transferrable, and that seemed a shame. It is possible to develop for iOS without using Obj-C or Swift. I’ve seen examples of that, but it’s seemed to me that isn’t the norm in the App Store.
While Microsoft used to be criticized often for not adhering to standards and not being friendly to other platforms, it’s been better at that than Apple has, since Jobs took over. (Apple used to be more standards-based, using Pascal, 68000 assembly, C and C++.)
I’m not bashing Obj-C or Cocoa. I like some things about that. I’m just talking about how it’s a significant investment for a developer to make, which they can’t use outside the Apple ecosystem.
