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. 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 could run the same software. Such a Wintel/PC computer running macOS is more commonly referred to as a Hackintosh and the most popular community effort developing and sharing the requisite software patches is known as OSx86. Since Apple's switch to the Intel platform, many non-Apple Wintel/ PC computers are technologically so similar to Mac computers that they are able to boot the Mac operating system using a varying combination of community-developed patches and hacks. During Apple's short lived Mac OS 7 licensing program authorized Mac clone makers were able to either purchase 100% compatible motherboards or build their own hardware using licensed Mac reference designs.

The earliest Mac clones were based on emulators and reverse-engineered Macintosh ROMs. The StarMax 3000/160MT, a Macintosh clone manufactured by MotorolaĪ Macintosh clone, also known as a Clonintosh (a portmanteau of ' Clone' and ' Macintosh'), is a computer running the Mac OS operating system that was not produced by Apple Inc.

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