Macintosh clone

A Macintosh clone is a personal computer made by a manufacturer other than Apple, using (or compatible with) Macintosh ROMs and system software.

Background

The Apple II and IBM PC computer lines were "cloned" by other manufacturers who had reverse-engineered the minimal amount of firmware in the computers' ROM chips and subsequently legally produced computers that would run the same software. These clones were seen by Apple as a threat, as Apple II sales had presumably suffered from the competition provided by Franklin Computer Corporation and other clone manufacturers, both legal and illegal. At IBM, the threat proved to be real: most of the market eventually went to cloners like Compaq, Leading Edge, Tandy, Kaypro, Packard Bell, Amstrad in Europe and dozens of smaller companies, and in short order IBM found it had lost control over its own platform.

Apple eventually licensed the Apple II ROMs to other companies. Apple licensed the Apple II ROMs to educational toy manufacturer Tiger Electronics to produce an inexpensive laptop with educational games and the AppleWorks software suite, the Tiger Learning Computer (TLC). The TLC lacked a built in display. Its lid acted as a holster for the cartridges that stored the bundled software since it had no floppy drive.