Apple Computer Inc is fast gaining a reputation as the most awkward company in the business to work with. Be Inc, the media operating system company which says it regards itself as adding value to Macintosh hardware rather than competing with Apple, reports that when it approached Apple for technical specifications to its G3 PowerPC 750 motherboards, for which there are numerous proprietary chipsets, it was told that the information was not available any longer, as it was only available to MacOS licensees, and no more such licensees were being issued. The chipsets were, of course, the ones used by the clonemakers, of which only one large vendor, Umax Data Systems Inc, is still in the clone business, and its license is set to expire in July. But Be says that it’s had such details from Apple before under non-disclosure, and has never been a MacOS licensee. The problem is not with the processor itself, says Be, as Motorola Inc is perfectly prepared to hand over whatever information it can. Apple’s position means that new G3 Macs from Apple will be a closed market to Be, and as far as the PowerPC market is concerned it must concentrate on system vendors using or providing their own G3 processor upgrade boards. Be’s latest PowerPC implementation of BeOS was tested for G3-compliance on boards from Newer Technologies Inc. Be says it doesn’t want to see the PowerPC platform fail, but can’t go to the time and effort of reverse engineering. It claims to have already received the first call from a developer who said he’d deliberately not bought a new Mac because it wouldn’t support BeOS. So as the last Apple clones fade from the market, Be will inevitably become an Intel-only option, just as it starts to ramp up business in the home multimedia sector, one of the markets that you would have expected Apple to be most interested in. Maybe Apple will stop supporting Quark and Adobe next.
