Considerable intrugue has been piqued by a story in MacWeek suggesting that IBM Corp has the contract to manufacture the Macintosh clones that Radius Inc plans to bring to market this month (CI No 2,632) – wow! is the reaction: IBM is going to build Mac clones! Since IBM has a big contract manufacturing business that is insatiable for work, and cash-strapped Radius was always likely to get the machines assembled under contract rather than put in the equipment to do it in-house, there is no reason to read anything into it building the Radius machines. No-one on either side is commenting at this stage, but MacWeek also suggests that IBM will take a stake in Radius, as if this was the clincher that the company is moving into the Mac world. But Radius has been looking for a big cash infusion for many months, and after its acquisition of Supermac Technology Inc, is flush with high-end graphics technologies that IBM could well mobilise to improve its Power Personals and RS/6000s – and multimedia personal computers. Radius also has desktop symmetric multiprocessing skills that might well be useful to IBM, not to mention a unit devoted to adapting its graphics for the iAPX-86 world.If IBM does build the machines, it will be at the Microelectronics Division’s manufacturing plant in Charlotte, North Carolina.
