UMAX SuperMac

~ the last words ~

A Macintosh was not a machine anyone around me owned. In 1996 the computers in my life were beige PC boxes you could open with a screwdriver, and the shops in Turkey sold the same thing. The Mac clone war was an argument happening entirely inside a platform I had no contact with, over a price bracket that was already above where the market I lived in operated.

The clones existed because Apple, in the mid nineties, was losing badly enough to license the Mac OS out. UMAX Technologies in Taiwan bought in and shipped the SuperMac line from 1996, running from the S900 tower at the top down through the C500 and C600 at the cheap end. The trick was that these were Apple motherboards surrounded by commodity PC components, so a SuperMac cost less than the equivalent Apple machine and could take more cards.

Then Steve Jobs came back and ended the program. Most licensees were cut immediately. UMAX was allowed to keep going, for two reasons that had nothing to do with charity: it was selling below a thousand dollars, which was the segment Apple kept failing to serve, and it was putting Macintoshes into East Asian markets where Apple had almost no presence. The reprieve came with a clock on it.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The S900 is the machine people still talk about. Six expansion slots in a tower you could actually work inside, at a price that made the comparison with Apple's own hardware embarrassing. For a couple of years it was possible to buy a faster and more expandable Macintosh than Apple sold, from a Taiwanese scanner company.

UMAX also became the only clone maker ever granted a Mac OS 8 license. That sounds like a win and functioned as a countdown, because the license had an expiry date written into it rather than a renewal clause anyone was obliged to honor.

~ what really happened ~

On 27 may 1998 UMAX stopped making Mac OS machines. Remaining inventory was sold off by 31 august. The Mac OS 8 license expired in july, and Apple did not renew it, with the reported sticking point being a proposed UMAX machine called the J710 arriving next to Apple's own upcoming iMac. Apple was about to sell a consumer Macintosh again and had no interest in competing with a licensee while doing it.

The company chose not to pivot into PCs. It could have kept the tooling and shipped Windows boxes like everyone else in Taiwan. Instead the SuperMac line simply stopped, which is a cleaner ending than most hardware gets.

~ the long tail ~

Technical support continued until 31 july 2002, four years after the last unit shipped. That is a long tail for a discontinued product from a company that had exited the market, and it is the detail that makes UMAX look better in retrospect than the story usually allows.

What died on 27 may 1998 was the idea that the Macintosh could be an open platform with more than one manufacturer. Apple has never revisited it. Every Mac since has come from exactly one company, and the two-year window when that was not true is now remembered mostly by people who owned an S900 and noticed it was better than what they were supposed to buy.

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