Look For Bargains As Mac Clones Invade Market
Competition! The word that sets companies to scrambling and consumers to salivating as prices plummet. On this month’s plate are the Macintosh clones.
Beginning this month, Apple will oversee the first of the Mac clones. Yes, prices will fall as the market and store shelves make room for yet another platform. We are now seeing prices for monitor, PC, keyboard, modem, mouse, doublespeed CD-ROM drive and, in some cases, printers ranging from $1,200 to $2,500, be it your IBMcompatible DX/66 MHz model and its more powerful Pentium partner or the Mac 7.0 to 7.5 and its PowerPC.
Initially you won’t see all Mac clones coming in at bargain prices because Radius Inc., one of two of the first takers, will compete in the aforementioned Power Mac market. The company will price these high-end models in the $3,500 to $6,000 range for desktops and laptops and target the workplace.
However, a company called Power Computing plans to sell high-end clones to vendors at 10 percent to 15 percent less than what will be known as the brand name. (Orders will be taken only on the Internet at the address info@powercc.com.)
What this will do for consumers is cause a price drop in IBM-compatibles and Macs already in inventory, since businesses will compete for the platform of the week. Maybe nothing drastic initially, but we will see price cuts somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 to $300 with juicier bundles offering 14.4 modems (maybe a few 28.8 modems offered with Pentiums and Power Macs) and decent color printers.
If you want to get in some good reading, peruse the various Mac mags. Macworld has a snazzy, 17-page special section in its April issue. It’s a little technical, but the layout and packaging make it easy to follow. I have to hand it to those folks for rolling up their sleeves as the clone-makers rolled out the first-generation platforms. Over all, the Macworld testers found the clones to work with most peripherals - keyboards, mouses and such. Bugs were found, of course, but that is a given with any first-generation product.
In Mac User, Maggie Canon dreams of “store shelves sag beneath the weight of Mac software and clones.” Not that I am a big Mac lover or user, but her dream is a good one for consumer price points. But one of the most interesting articles was a real tech-heavy piece in Byte’s March issue.
In short - and in English - the best thing about Mac clones seems to be the prospect of running IBM-compatible and Mac software on one machine. Most consumers are frustrated by myriad platforms and what machine can or can’t run a particular program. Any music CD lover knows the joy of picking up your favorite artist’s latest title without having to read the fine print. It doesn’t matter whether you have a Pioneer CD player or Technics or any brand name. Plug and play is the name of the game.
Another great thing is if Apple continues to maintain control, all clones will have a standard, unlike the 1980s’ cloning madness of IBM compatibles that resulted in a host of low-grade and incompatible hardware.
Best of all, a future design will allow you to boost the memory, RAM, video, etc. using a card in which the slot would be separate from the motherboard. Such a one-slot upgrade would eliminate the need to fiddle with the motherboard, which holds all the circuitry together and therefore needs a delicate touch. IBM compatible-makers need to clone the Mac clone’s future one-card upgrade. Ease of upgrading will be a big draw for the consumer.