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Perfect time for Apple to license the mac?

5 points by fedbook ↗ HN
Back in the 90's we had several mac clones - computers running mac hardware and mac os, yet not made by apple. do you think now that we have the M1 chip, there is any chance apple will license out the M1 to manufacturers? After all, they can't satisfy everyone with one model and system builders would be happy to have an M1 to play with. Only makes sense to me.

9 comments

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daviddever23box
Apple uses many of the same hardware and component manufacturers as do Dell, HP, Microsoft, etc., so I don't see any benefit to this–and they seem to be doing a decent job of satisfying their customers in terms of hardware.

You're right - it only makes sense to you, though I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

fedbook
I’m a datacenter tech. The amount of dongles and outdated drivers required for simple serial connections or vga connections wastes tons of time. Licensing out the M1 would allow for a company to make a MacBook like laptop with every port! Perfect for technicians.
Tomte
You can have all those ports on regular x86 laptops. We used to have that.

Nothing about port selection has anything to do with the M1 chip.

account-5
I don't think licencing their tech is in Apples walled garden business model
runjake
There is zero chance.

Apple is clearly not interested in the builder market at all.

musicale
Perfect time: revenue only up 29% (disappointing analysts), cash reserves have dwindled to $200B, and Microsoft just took over as the world's most valuable company. ;-)
BjoernKW
The question is, why would they? At the moment, the M1 constitutes a competitive advantage for Apple. Licensing that processor to other manufacturers and for purposes other than building Apple hardware would only dilute that advantage.

"System builders who'd like to play with an M1" doesn't seem like a relevant or sufficiently well-defined market segment to justify such a huge trade-off.

accountofme
From my memory, licensing macos ans allowing clones was bad for apple.

I remember that they caused hardware sales to drop due to the clones being cheaper and the money made from the OS license did not make up for the shortfall.

Anyway I have Zero data to back this up. But I remember reading about this years ago.

warrenm
>Only makes sense to me

Pretty much

No one in their right mind at Apple would ever open up their tightly-integrated (ie always "Just Works™") hardware stack for outsiders to "play with"

Want to "play"? Buy something else

Apple doesn't care what else you buy - they do care what they sell (and support)

If they opened-up the M1 (or any of their other proprietary products) to outsiders, they'd be on the hook for supporting whatever insanity other manufacturers did to/with it