
The Clone Quandary
245
Apple’s greatest strategic mistake may have been its refusal to license the
Macintosh hardware and operating system until it was too late. Many
observers reason that when the Mac was introduced in 1984, it was so far
superior to anything the competition offered that the only thing that held
Apple back from domination of the personal computer industry was the
company’s stubborn policy of going it alone.
Macs rely heavily on Apple’s proprietary read-only memory (ROM)
and custom-designed chips called ASICs, short for Application-Specic
Integrated Circuits. This prevents companies from producing Mac clones
without ...