Terrific story man, never heard of this one...

"...which made system upgrades a piece of cake" *Tim Cook has left the chat*

Well I just found my new ringtone

Yeah, I owned one of these. Bought one of their Tower Floor Standing Units. It rivaled the PowerMac 9600.

Actually, Steve Jobs almost licensed Mac OS to Sony's VAIO laptops. He was so impressed by the hardware quality of VAIO. Great video man!

That was the most convenient thing to have in order to get you to 10 mins, lol. Bravo.

Great historical look back at this “blip” in the Apple story! I remember it all so well....seems like it wasn’t=t all that long ago! Damn, how did I get SOOOOOOO old???

I was a Product Lead for Power Computing during 1995-1999l I loved that company. Though I would not call myself a Mac Guy, since during my tech years I was a window , unix, and Mac admin.... I had so much fun during my time. :-) (1998 - 1999 we maintained our Power Computing brand while Apple devoured our little company. )

3:52 damn Jobs looks fukking happy to have MS on his side 😂

back in tha day, we used to refer to this period as the Clone Wars.

Gawd you’re young! In 1996, I graduated high school! 🤣 But I watched this era unfold in the pages of MacUser (yeah!) and MacWorld, as I used my Performa 400 to “go online” with a 14.4k modem. Good times, good times. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

My first “Mac” was a Motorola Starmax 5500 rocking a 200Mhz PowerPC 604e. I had a blast playing Unreal with a hacked Diamond Monster 3D.

Thanks again for a great video! I’ve learnt something new today, I never knew that history about Apple. Hope your keeping well Quinn!

Love how you summarised the history of early Bill Gates and Steve Jobs partnership.

Super video.. very specific but important part of the history of such a big company... Loved the end credits.. that song is gonna be stuck in my mind for the entire day..

Remember when Sears sold a licensed Apple //c clone?

Thanks for showing us that internal video at the end, it was hilarious! (9:26)

I love the new format. Keep it up!

very good job finding this information! I didn't know how interesting it would be!

Thanks for the super informative video, Quinn!

Wow, that’s a blast from the past! I started my official freelance career and a power computing tower and had kind of forgotten about them! It was a quite good machine at the time and definitely allowed me to get into the design world, though I quickly transitioned back to a real Mac and have been there ever since. Thanks for sharing that bit of apple history!

Great video! I saw a few of these around the office wwaaaayyy back when. Great hear about where they came from and a bit if computing history.

I still have my Power Computing PowerTower Pro 225 stored away somewhere! It was a great machine.

Your video reminded me of the Pirates of the Silicon Valley movie - I need to watch it again now

In 2000 and 2001, I taught A-Plus and N=Plus courses for our high school vocational department. We acquired a dozen Mac clones for the A-Plus class. They were easy to assemble and because Mac OS liked SCSI, we were able to integrate aspects not normally found in PCs of the period. I developed my fondness for Apple during that time.

I love your videos, Quinn! You always make such awesome content

The Power PC was a collaboration between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. From that relationship, Motorola had its own clone called the StarMax. I had a Motorola StarMax 4000 from either 1996 or 97.

One interesting detail: Steve Jobs never actually "killed" the licensing program for the Mac clones. The licensing agreement was for the clones to run "Macintosh System 7". So within about a month of Steve Jobs returning to Apple, the operating system update that was slated for mid-1997 and originally going to be called "7.7" was renamed "Mac OS 8", and that was the effective end of the licensing agreement. Also I believe Power Computing was one of a very few (if not the only) manufacturer to sell computers that would run BeOS (dual-boot configurations). At that time (1996-97) BeOS looked like a vision of the future compared to the then antiquated Macintosh System 7.X. I believe your shirt was from Macworld 1997 (pretty sure Power Computing wasn't in business yet in early 1995, they appeared later that year). Macworld 1997 was Power Computing's last real hurrah, they had a bigger presence than Apple that year, and were running a "military" style campaign featuring shirts like yours, camo pants, and staffers driving around the streets of San Francisco in logo-ed Hummers. Very soon after that came the news about "Mac OS 8" and the story of Power Computing and "Mac Clones" came to a speedy conclusion.

Love this type of video. Keep them coming

"My 3rd birthday in 1996" - oh God, I'm old.

The main reason I love your channel is because you often do videos about Apple's history and also because you wear amazing watches! Keep up the great work!

Another stellar video! Keep it up man!

this is miles better than any history lecture i’ve ever listened to.

Snazzy Labs has been one of my favorite channels lately! Keep up the great work!

wow i did not know this thanks for the history lesson. :)

I remember some clone Mac back then. Wanted one but of corse couldn’t afford it. Good story. Remember loving first Mac classic back in days and remember buying magazines to read about Mac and Mac clones. Do wish Apple would go back clones Mac’s. But we know that never happen and hell would freeze over before that ever happens. Lol, good video. :)

Such an amazing and informative video!!! Thank you!

I remember this time. I actually owned a few pre-PowerPC and early PowerPC Apples. Prior to Power Computer being picked up by Apple, I was eyeing if memory serves me an 8-CPU mini-tower they offered. I think at the time, I owned a PowerPC 7100, 7200, and 7600. A lot of people don't know about Gates interest in Apple during that time.

That internal "I think we're a clone now" is certainly a BOPPP!!

I got one of these in 1996 when i was in college for Graphic Design. It was awesome. Upgraded it a few years later to a 450 G3 with a newer tech processor upgrade.

I had a Power Computing tower. I don’t remember the model. It was was my home office machine and I was very happy with it. I also had several Macs I used for audio and video production work.

Great background research. I remember those, I read about them in press articles of the time.

First of all; more if this type of content. This was really good. Second; where can we get more of these “internal” videos?! That was fantastic!

I really enjoyed this video. Love a bit of tech history :)

If you haven't done it already, you should do a video about BeOS. The PPC based operating system that almost became OS X.

I was a Beos Developer back then and our standard machines where the 7000 series desktops. The last we bought, still own is the 7600. It originally came with a 604e cpu, 8mb ram 2.1 gb SCSI drive. Within weeks we upgraded it to 16mb of ram. That was a lot of ram back in them days. But now it sits with a massive 256 mb of ram and a G3 333 accelerator. Runs Mac os 7.6.1 and BeOS 5.0 beautifully.

Yeah, I remember using some clones at the IKEA catalogue dept back in the 90s. Remember them saying that it packed a lot more power for the money. But I didn't really learn about the clone program until years later. I remember that they were developing ways to render furniture with different fabrics so they didn't have to take photos of all of them. Quite cutting edge for the time. And the clones were used in that.

probably your best video yet... and I remember having a few Clone Macs in the computer shop I worked at in high school. They were off-lease machines from design firms and had all the A/V cards installed. They were still better at crunching SD video than Windows Xp machines lol

Great work on the video and the content 👍

When I was in college I had a Macintosh Emulator card for the Amiga computer called Emplant. Later on, ShapeShifter (software only Mac emulator) was released and that was a game-changer.

I've been a graphic designer since 1980 B.C - Before Computrers. And in the late 90's the company I worked for deployed a fleet of Power Computing machines. They were stout, modular, and worked pretty good, and were reasonably cost effective for the company. That ended with the iMac era, and they were one by one retired. I also recall that the first thing I did when I was isussed a Power Mac G3, was drop the Hockey Puck into my desk drawer, and scoot down to Staples and buy a Logitec standard 2-button mouse with a thumbwheel.

The company I worked for at the time had a Powertower Pro as well as a model of the Motorola clone. The Power computing machine was a beast at the time. The processor being on a card made it super easy to upgrade. I believe by the time we got rid of them, we had bumped them up to G3's or G4's using Sonnettech cards.

This was so interesting and I loved that xerox parc video.

Then: People: 8 Megabytes of ram is okay Now: People: 8 Gigabytes of ram is okay Future: People: 8 Terabytes of ram is okay

Hey Snazzy, do one on my favorite Mac clone - Umax and their SuperMac line, which was my first Mac around 1097 😜

I was living in Austin around 96-98 and actually designed a couple of powercomputing ads for Macworld mag. Eventually later in 1998, a friend of mine in customer service at powercomputing, gave me a power tower pro 250 that had a bad drive. Eventually became my main machine until the power supply gave out in 2000. They were great machines and it was interesting to see the demise of the Mac clones happening in real-time.

I was in college when this came about and our computer lab had Macs, Power Computing and UMAX versions of licensed Macs all side-by-side. When I got my first Mac on their student program I went with the PowerMac 7100/66.

Love your videos so much !

A trip back in time. I remember specialist stores in London that sold clones and lots of other cool stuff.

Nobody: Guy at 9:44: “the heat from Pentium warms a mid sized town”

Yup, Power Computing was my first mac. Was short lived but I learned a ton from that machine.

Such interesting history!!! Thanks for the educational vid

Wow. I only finally junked my old UMax Power PC SuperMac when I moved house a few years ago. great tower at the time, with PCI slots!

I did have a Power Computing clone that I used in 1996/1997 for professional graphic design work. It was a great experience. I still have a sticker.

Never knew about this, thanks for making this.

Great video, great story. Good job!

Our school back in the 1990s had Macs and Power Computing ironically. The Mac OS is all we've ever known back then. It was only in the late 1990s when they switched to the *cheaper* IBM PCs, Gateways & Compaqs running Windows and they started offering Microsoft word processing, spreadsheet, etc. classes as an elective. And for our Computer Science teachers and IT it became easier for them to network computers and printers from class to class.

I never owned one knew, but a relative of mine got one from powercomputing from work three years ago. I now have parts of it decorating my shelves.

my parents had a PowerTower Pro in 97'. It was a great machine. They used it until 2000 when they purchased an iMac G3.

i have a Motorola Starmax clone sitting on my desk as i watch this video! i actually use it regularly, alongside several other (official) powermacs i own.

The Mac clones as well as the tower based Power Macs from 1996 onwards was using CHRP - the hardware design that replicated the PC ATX case factor for computers that were using RISC based technologies that still needed its proprietary components, but open enough to lower production costs. Sun and I think other IBM workstation class machines used the CHRP design.

I love videos like these that take the viewer back in time to a period of history that not many people know about. I didn't know this video reached 10 minutes until I read the comments after I finished watching the video; I was so engrossed by the video that 10 minutes felt like half of that. Nice job, Quinn! :)

Oh wow... I'd completely forgotten about PowerComputing. I had one of them. It was my third home PC. Lasted about a month before it overheated and went pop.

I did know about the clones. In grad school, my class first used tower clones....before then they upgraded to G4 graphite towers (and the first time I used OS X). One note about Microsoft Basic: it was really ground breaking for home PCs, as previously, different computer systems could have different forms of Basic (that would be incompatible with one another). The Radio Shack TRS-80 was the most popular 8-bit computer before IBM (in terms of unit sales), followed by Apple, Commodore, and Atari 8-bit systems. At that time, "homebrew" gatherings and magazines were popular for getting your own software (by reading printed code and trying to hand type on your computer). Having a form of Basic that had interpreters for different computer architectures, just meant that you didn't have to know if there would be certain functions you'd have to change for your architecture, and every line of code could be identical. If you'd like to learn more about the history of computing, I think it's great that you can find comprehensive TV series that aired during the era of the home PC is available on the internet (Computer Chronicles). When it comes to CPUs being on expansion boards, it seems it was really popular during the 286 and 386 era (the arguement was that you could turn your old 286 to brand new 386, or even later 486). Of course the changes in bus architecture (if new interfaces and memory speeds) were a hindsight. Also when it comes to the relationship of Apple to Microsoft....I seem to remember another time that was when Jobs came back to Apple, and during a launch, did have Bill Gates come on the main screen to talk about a partnership with Office products (and this was after WIndows 95 launch/more die hard camps of PC vs Mac). I remember in the video you can hear boos in the crowd, but Steve Jobs trying to calm them and explaining the improvements with Microsoft products. I'm now agnostic with PC formats (having both Windows and Mac)....I do like the integration of Office 365 on my PCs and Macs

I owned one of these i loved it. i used to recommend this to my clients over the macs that were being sold at the time.

I remember the time when we had a Mac clones shop in my city. Didn’t last, but it was exciting times.

I purchased a Umax S-900 to replace my Apple Power PC 6100(Pizza Box) that I had purchased after graduating college. The Umax was HUGE compared to the 6100,and had so much expandability I never did run out of space inside. It was powered by DUAL 250 MHz CPU's and 50 Mhz busThe outside of the case looked pretty sharp too, at least for a PC. Funny thing though, Quinn mentioned Power Computing was the only company allowed to update to system 8. But I'm sure I was running system 8 in this Umax computer until I finally upgraded.

thank You, very interesting, great research.

KZfaq Recommended Tab coming through in the clutch. Great video and I hope you find a new plant to replace the one over your right shoulder.

Specing out a Mac Clone was all the rage amongst us "Desktop Publishers" at the time. Tiger Direct, MacMall catalogs were highly earmarked. But the hardware changed so fast, you couldn't keep up unless you had a corporate buying account. Finally getting that PowerPC accelerated chip and 16mb of RAM was going to keep us "set" for awhile. At least we thought at the time.

I think we're a clone now! 🤣 what a nice gem at the end 😂

I owned a Power Computing machine. My first Mac, and I loved it. I had a tower version ordered from Mac Warehouse.

Wow this is interesting

I used to set up these machines for my clients. They loved them. They were also very easy to upgrade. UMAX made an excellent clone as well.

I had the Sawtooth G3 Tower which I upgraded to a G4; Power went on to be the Austin Campus. I still have the bundled Cartoon History of the World CD somewhere … Thanks.

Most people seem to forget (or never knew) that when Apple started its big business initiative in 1985 and introduced the Apple LaserWriter and about the time Aldus PageMaker was first released, Microsoft released two new business programs for the Macintosh (as we still called it back then), Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, which took full advantage of the mouse and windows. At the time, the comparable programs on the PC (running MS-DOS) were WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. These were well entrenched in the corporate world, but when people learned about the ease of use and the professional results of these new Microsoft programs they wanted them! My very favorite Macintosh commercial is from this time. I downloaded it from KZfaq but I can't find it on here now (KZfaq videos go away??!!). It's called "The Pitch" and I literally fell on the floor laughing when I first saw it on TV...and they never even mention the name of the product! You'll recognize it when the corporate officers say "Your presentation was impressive, but...there's a problem'" Microsoft finally came out with versions of Word and Excel for the PC but the install was complicated (I got to do this to several computers in our office) because first you had to install a Windows 2.04 'life-support' system that would only launch when either of these programs launched to support the mouse and windows these programs depended on. In this way DOS users were dragged, kicking and screaming, into Microsoft Windows. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 came out as a complete GUI that Apple sued Microsoft over "look and feel." Apple was a bit more successful in its suit against Digital Research's GEM (Graphical Environment Manager). I was using an AtariST ("Jackintosh") which used this system but it was burned into the ROMs before Apple's lawsuit. The PC version had to have its windows extend all the way across the screen and there was some equally obnoxious requirement for menus. GEM was never popular on the PC and Digital Research went out of business. My wife and I had a thriving graphic design/desktop publishing business back when that was still a thing. We used the Macintosh because it was just better for graphic design than the PC, with its Trinitron display and 72 ppi screen--I mean it was PostScript perfect. Photoshop was only available on the Mac, not available on the PC until version 2.5. We always knew the Mac clone effort was a loser, though the clone makers (I only remember initially three and then two of any prominence and I can't remember the names of those other two) sure showed where Apple was coming up short. It only accentuated the various ways Apple was "doomed" at this time. Then Corel Draw was released for the PC and suddenly Everyone was a 'graphic designer.' :-/ BTW, that clone looks a lot like the Macintosh Performa 638 I upgraded to about this time.

I had a Motorola Starmax 3000 / 160 (I think that's what it was called). It was my 2nd MacOS machine, my first being a PowerMac 6100/60. I used to run Logic & Deck II, and even had it SMPTEd to my old Atari ST for MIDI. I still use Macs to this day for music, as well as software development.

I remember those Hackintosh computers but never had one. I started working on Macs back in 1993 and used to use a Power PC with a mono screen in a small smoke filled studio 😀

I never owned one, but we did want to get one., mostly for the upgrade-ability you mentioned. At the time, our home Macs were a black and white Classic, a Quadra 630, and at some point around the release of System 8, PPC 9600. Both of the latter, my mom got as they were de-commissioned from her then job.

I remember these machines. I didn’t own one of these but I did have a Umax S900 at one point. The clone years were pretty crazy.

I used to work for Motorola Computer Group in ‘95-00 . We built and serviced the StarMax computers for System 7 and was nearly devastated by the yanking of licensing Jobs pulled. We built from the ground up, those machines, main boards, SCSI controllers, etc. Many feeder businesses died that year.

Apple didn't sell the clones... rather, Apple licensed MacOS to clone manufacturers like PowerComputing and Motorola to use on their own computers. Though Apple did have the "Tanzania" motherboards that some clone manufacturers used.

My college had these and I loved them. They were super fast.

hey, Snazzy love it!

This reminds me of when Apple (Jobs in particular) were looking to reach a deal with Sony to have Vaio laptops running Mac OS X.

Back in the day I owned a couple of the Power Computing systems an a Motorola system (I forget which ones now). However I bought them used well after the clone era ended. They were good machines. The thing about the authorized clones is that while OS 8 and 9 were not authorized for them, many would run it. I can't remember what sort of software hacks had to be used, but I was running OS8.6 on my machines and it was rock solid. At the time a ton of the guys I worked with loved to play Starcraft. This was in the day of the 56k modem, and due to the poor quality of the copper lines where lived at the time it would just be easier for us to get together and do a lan party. At the time I lived at home and essentially had the basement to myself. I picked up three cheap computer desks and chairs at Office depot. At the time we were playing on 640x480 monitors, and those could be had pretty cheap as the standard was moving to 800x600 or 1024x768. So I spent about $200 to get everything I needed as well as trading some work to a guy I knew in the area who worked on old macs for the University of Georgia. It turns out that there weren't that many people who would dive into an old Mac LC that the University was using to run scientific equipment but hadn't been sold or supported by Apple for years. I also had a Power Mac 7600 at one point with a G3 CPU upgrade running OS X 10.1. Again, I forget the software hack I had to use to make it work, but it required me to purchase a USB card and USB sound card. It was pretty solid though. I booted OS 7.5.5, OS 9, and OS X on it (some games didn't play well with the newer operating systems). To this day I have fond memories of ClarisWorks (later AppleWorks), and still wish I had a computer running it sometimes. For the most part you got everything right. One clone maker, Umax also had an OS 8 license and shipped a few machines with it. The other mistake that I found was the description of the upgrades made to the Power Mac 7600. For all intents and purposes the PM 7600 was virtually identical to the PM 7500 save the CPU that shipped with it. If you decide to do a deeper dive into the authorized Mac Clones, see if you can find info on the Daystar MP+ which could run up to 4 PPC 604e CPUs. I've always been curious whether they could run multiple G3 CPUs. I know they could be upgraded to G3, and I'm pretty sure G4 CPUs.

Ah memories! My first computer was a Power Wave 120. I eventually maxed the ram and upgraded the CPU daughter card to a G3. It was a great company. One thing I remember - not mentioned here, was that Power Computing top end boxes surpassed Wintel boxes, temporarily putting apple on top - needs verification. Secondly, I remember that the top boxes of Power Computing were beating the Apple top end boxes. I remember reading articles that Apple then tried to get all the clones to do low end boxes, leaving the high end to Apple - this too needs verification. Anyway, wished I had found a way to keep that first computer. ☹️

I had a power computing machine once back in the day, when a friend of mine, had the analog board in his 2nd gen iMac g3 die, I took his logic assembly and "upgraded" Power computing machine to a G3!

We had a PowerComputing system as well as one made by UMAX. This brings back memories.

great coverage