Motorola's Half A**ed Macintosh
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- čas přidán 5. 04. 2024
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I got a Motorola StarMax Macintosh clone from 1996 - the one everyone always talks crap about. Is it really as bad as they say?
Featuring special guest star and possible Macintosh clone himself, @Mac84!
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🍎 Steve's StarMax video: • Motorola's LAST Macint...
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#Motorola #Apple #BeOS - Věda a technologie
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I zoned out for a brief moment and I see he installed BeOS in the meanwhile. That shouldn't surprise me.
i knew as soon as he made a 2nd partition that OS shenanigans were going to happen lol
I was expecting "And here is Minecraft running on the worst Macintosh clone."
Ik same
Time to bust out Classicube on BeOS!
well shouldn't it be DOOM?
@@kenon6968 lol
If 65scribe's account of things is accurate, Apple was hoping the clones would slake the high volume, low end portion of the market. So Motorola was indeed doing what the board at Apple wanted.
Some of UMAX Clones where targeting the sub 1000$ Market
This lead themselves to Continue having the Mac Clone licence
This is correct, Apple wanted the cloners to go after the low end and leave them the high end. I assume Motorola complied with that since Apple was a large customer of theirs.
@@PhillyMJS And Motorola did just that, but still got the shaft from Steve Jobs after he took over.
It was Power Computing who infuriated Apple, by making better "Macs" at a lower price than Apple was.
Apple assumed that the clones would go after the low-end since that's what happened in the PC world. Hence Spindler negotiated the MacOS licenses to be a fixed, low price. Gil Amelio came in, saw that the clones went after the high end, and decided to release MacOS 8 in order to renegotiate the clone deals to be a percentage of the sale cost so that even high-end clones would actually make Apple money while still keeping the Clone market. UMAX was the only company that agreed to the new deal, hence there is a UMAX-branded version of MacOS 8 out there. When Steve Jobs came back he kept up Amelio's negotiations (originally Jobs was just going to be interim CEO before they found a replacement, he didn't really initially want to take over Apple he thought they were beyond saving) but none of the clone manufacturers agreed, and hence the clones died.
In the various retellings of this timeline it gets shortened to "Steve Jobs came back and released MacOS 8 to kill the clones" but it actually started with Gil Amelio just wanting a bigger cut.
@@KarlBaronAmelio believes that Steve Jobs wanted to be the CEO, and eventually convinced the board to make him CEO.
Makes sense, since Jobs had been ousted before and obviously wasn't averse to coming back.
Can confirm, we had the Motorola machines in the office at Be and even then, they were, um, not our favourites.
I worked at Motorola when they launched these. They seemed very proud of them. I remember one day they had them all set up in a room at the Motorola Campus and employees were allowed to buy them at a discount. I didn't buy one.
Motorola barely noticed them. That company had much bigger projects and products than a shitty PowerMac clone. A union would not have allowed Motorola to abuse their employees in this way (encouraging them to buy a Mac in a Windows-dominated world).
That Mac does not support *SDRAM* ... Only *3.3V EDO DIMM* (unbuffered, non-parity) modules. Please be aware that this mainboard is very picky about the DRAM speed. 60ns or faster while 50ns do not always work ... so 60ns it is.
it explains the shape
The issue with CF cards is that they report themselves as removable instead of fixed drives, so some computers just won't work well with them. For certain brands you can download a MS-DOS tool that will flip that bit and make them look as fixed. You can check the state of this bit with the HWINFO utility, also for MSDOS. Some "industrial" CF cards are also reported as fixed drives.
Thanks for this!!
Btw, not every CF card reports as removable. Check with the manufacturer or the drive properties in Windows before using it.
That _shouldn't_ be a problem with Macs, even on old Macs with PCMCIA slots they supported naively installing MacOS to a standard removable CF card in the PCMCIA slot and booting off of it. But with a weird clone like this, who knows!
Yeah, I'd have just used a IDE to SD or even IDE to SATA m.2(which I have in my ibook)
I think that's only a Windows issue. I don't know why it didn't work here. But I do know why it only shows up as 8 gigs: it's a limit when using common CHS values, IIRC real Macs also don't like booting from larger drives.
He mentions a bad startup sound but it's never shown in the whole video! I have to hear this
SAME
It's the same chime as used in the Power Macintosh 4400, which in turn is almost identical to the chime used in the Power Macintosh G3 series.
If I remember correctly, it's just slightly shorter than actual Macs. It stops before the chime has completely faded out. Perhaps to save a small amount of space in the ROM and get away with using a smaller capacity chip, maybe. I dunno.
it probably goes "hello moto"
Yeah, it's annoying that Mactracker doesn't have the clones, athough Apple was involved in every one of those to some extent. There were fewer iterations of the chime than you might think.
I worked in the IT dept of a newspaper in the 90's and we experimented with all the clones. The Power Computing ones were the only ones we bought more of. Most of them, we had more issues than the regular Apple computers. I didn't have a copy of BeOS, but I did get Yellow Dog Linux onto them without any difficulty.
Cheers!
I kinda forgot Motorola made clones. My family had a power computing power center 150. Ran beOS off a Zip drive, it was kinda incredible
Motorola, the same company that made the 68k processors the Macintosh series of computers used initially, made a Mac clone. This somehow seems very fitting
they co developed the powerpc chip too
Ahhh Motorola, maker of my formative CPU (6809) then my favourite (68000). Happy days...
68k is the goat, responsible for more 8bit machines and consoles than anything but maybe the 8080?
@@jessepatterson8897 ...the 68000 was 32-bit from the beginning...
@@jessepatterson8897 are you thinking of the 6502?
6809
@@fnjesusfreakit had 32bit instructions and registers but all the ALUs and internal databuses were 16bit. 32bit from the beginning is a bit strong. Definitely preparing for the 32bit successors though.
Who would have guessed that Apple would have designed a criminally compromised motherboard in the late '90s?
I'm surprised! That seems more like a mid-90s Apple thing
@@MaxOakland Well, 1996 is more like mid-90s I'd say. The late 90s were well into G3 and even G4 territory, I think my school bought a first-gen G4 (PCI) for the arts lab in 1999. Only one year after the flawed 4400 Apple introduced the beige G3, which was an absolute workhorse.
Since Apple designed and created the logic board, it should not be "Motorola Sucks" but instead "Apple Sucks".
This is silly. Apple sucks, yes, but not for this, since the one to commission and put the thing in production was Motorola, and thus Motorola was in charge of giving the parameters of the design, the production itself and the quality control.
This is like saying that the one responsible for the bad quality of a line of cotton-sugar fabric umbrellas failing is the one that spun the sugar, not the genius who ordered the fabric to build their umbrellas.
@@Jossandoval If that "logic" follows, then it is not Motorola to blame for buying shitty Apple boards, but the customers who bought the Motorolas with shitty Apple logic boards. I mean, the customers were the last in the chain to buy the computers with Apple's shitty logic boards. Apple fandom twisting itself in knots again. That "logic" is just as flawed as Apple's shitty logic boards.
@@Jossandovalthe sugar spinner could refuse to sell to them, and not put their name on a bad product
Did you even watch the video dude?
@@NextMomentOnEarth And this is why you argue than Motorola doesn't sucks? Your argument is still bad. The mistake of one is sell themselves out to make a bad part, the mistake of the other was ordering said bad part to use in the design of a bad product and then purposely sell it.
Motorola was the villain this time, deal with it.
There’s a Motorola engineer shedding a tear right now you meanie 😂
The sad part is this was not engineered by Motorola, it was made by Apple themselves...
The one thing Motorola got right.... a standard form factor Macintosh 3.5" drive with integrated face plate you can drop in any PC case. As far as I know, the StarMax was the only machine with those. The whole PS/2 port thing on the Tanzania platform boards was an attempt at Motorola and Apple to conform to the stillborn Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) for PowerPC. That was "round two" of the AIM alliance to create a standard PowerPC ISA, the first being the PReP standard that IBM released and Windows NT PPC utilized. In the end, the most popular desktop PowerPC platform landed up being Apple's PowerMacs, but they never saw alternative OSes outside of BeOS and Linux.
Memory on these is VERY WEIRD, as they use an "in between" standard. They used 3.3v EDO or FPM DIMMs, not the more common 5v versions used on the PowerSurge/TNT machines. 3.3v DIMMs are almost always PC66/100 SDRAM.
Can't argue with anything you said, but I happily used that machine for 4 years for writing school papers, email, 90s-era web browsing, and some games. For basic computing needs, it was fine. Plus it was a lot cheaper than the Apple equivalents, which were out of reach for my student budget.
oh, and you wouldn't want an internal SCSI hard drive on this thing, the SCSI on here was SLOW AS HELL!!
quit hating on the Tanzania. It was a perfectly adequate computer just in the same way a Yugo was a perfectly adequate car. Sure, its missing some "features" but at least it still computes!
Sir what was the apple model shown that used the same logic board. Just curious about it. I run rabbit holes on EveryMac looking up various models to see how he’s how much ram can this one take or what bus speed was this one.
@@chadlawson9346 Thats the Powermac 4400, that is the Apple equivelent to this machine.
Motorola was a huge part of PowerPC though...
We know what can Be
But we really want to know
Will he run Haiku?
hello moto moment indeed
It looks like this inherited the RAM weirdness of the PowerMac 4400 as well. With those, the earlier 160MHz logic boards had a limit of 96MiB since they didn't support 64MiB and larger modules, while the 1997/200MHz updated boards could do 160MiB with 64MiB modules installed in slots 2 and 3. Perhaps the Tanzania logic board was designed for some soldered RAM, but it wasn't populated on the StarMax 3000 and PM 4400 versions. That would explain the weirdness of the first slot only accepting single banked modules and limited capacity. Back in the PPC era, I encountered the odd 4400 and the fact it needed 3.3v EDO DIMMs was a PITA, since 5v DIMMs were far more common in Macs.
"We'll call this one Mototola Sux, and this one Motorola Sucks"
And then later it's called Motorola Suxxxxx
I'm also an Albuquerque native like Bill, I love that mugshot. I'm sure APD has it in a hall of fame somewhere.
Just became a channel member! Been here since you started, so it's amazing to see how you've grown as a channel. Here's to many more years of Action Retro!
Thank you so much!!
No problem! I love your channel and videos :D@@ActionRetro
Also worth noting Be was founded by Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple-boss
My first PowerPC was a clone, the Power Computing Power 100 desktop case. It was pretty great for only $1700, cheaper than an Apple 7100 or 8100, and I upgraded it a lot. I played Marathon and software mode Quake on it.
Really enjoyable video, I had heard they where not great, liked getting to see BeOS running on it aswell.
"His Royal Highness Motorola" - encapsulates why Motorola left the computing market fairly quickly.
your channel is great. a good mixture of funny and interesting.
I had a Power Mac 4400 back in the early 2Ks - this a pseudo trip down memory lane.
The Tanzania/LPX-40 based units were pretty darn quirky.
When I was a software tester for a company in the late 90s, we had several of these in the lab for doing tests on PPC Macs.
I had a starmax 4000/200 MT and I loved it! I used it as a network print and file server for a long time.
That 3D "Flight" game vaguely reminded me of "ChaosVR" which was a MacOS 3DGM game, no real purpose to the demos that were released, but I remember spending hours just flying around shooting enemies with no real purpose. Too bad that never really turned into anything but a tech demo.
I have one of those SuperMac towers with dual processors that I installed BeOS on. Worked really well! I even have the matching SuperMac monitor with its special video cable.
when i was a student there was a class that was basically a company that had to pay for it's own gear etc, it was cheesy called "cut paste and copy" but they did like Desktop publishing and layout (for esteemed clients such as the local diners placemats!) and i was in the class for about 2 years. I was also the IT guy (guess what i do now) and we had a starmax, this brought me back with several waves of nostalgia and mediocrity. (our server was a quadra 900 which you've covered as well. loved that key.)
For someone who worked for the local distributor of Umax Mac clones, those clones were way better than Apple's own hardware.
While Apple were hell bent on using SCSI the Umax could use any IDE drives.
Only downside is you had to have the included MacOS CD for it toi boot as it needed an extension to see the drive, so you have to copy that extension over to the newly installed OS, some people forgot so most of our returns were for that, easy fix 😂
I heard the Mac clone licenses were only for System 7 so Apple incremented the Mac OS to System 8 and refused to issue any clone licenses, hence killing the clone program.
They did issue a license for Mac OS 8 - to Power Computing, I think?
@@3rdalbum If so, it could be one reason why Power Computing was acquired by Apple in late 1997.
@@3rdalbum UMAX got a licence for making clones with Mac OS 8 because they have some products targeting the sub 1000$ market
and Mac OS 8 was given for free to all Registed Power Computing Customers when they got aquired by apple
I worked in the design department for a local printing company which had 2 of the SuperMac PowerPcs in the late 90s. They worked great.
Anytime you say, "terrible" I get all excited. There was no question what to click next on CZcams!
I used to have a PowerComputing PowerCenter 132 as a young teen that was given to me from a family friend who worked for NOAA. I think they ditched it pretty fast when Jobs killed the clones but at that age and for free it was a heck of a lot of computer to me. Ironically one of my strongest memories was if I powered it up and hit the interrupt button right away It had it did not do the sad mac face and chimes but instead a sad mac and car crash soundbite. For some reason teenage me loved that I guess lol.
“Unthinkable today” but we forget how many people were demanding Apple do cloning because Microsoft succeeded. If CZcams was around in the 1990s, there’d be dozens of videos explaining why Apple should do Macintosh clones and why avoiding clones was a dumb move that no other company would do.
I think the issue is that Apple's history doesn't really follow the same path as any other home / office computer company. So prior the second Steve Jobs era, people just had history to go off which was that the MS model of business was the only one that was viable long term and if you didn't follow this, you would disappear. Following this logic, Apple was about to die and allowing clones was the best thing they could do to save themselves.
Of course now we see how things panned out, we know it's possible (though still hard) to not follow the pack and still succeed. But in the late 90s? Only the most optimistic were assuming Apple would survive.
I had a StarMax 3000 and it served me well. I even upgraded it with a Sonnet G3 upgrade card. That setup worked fine for Photoshop work until I finally bought a G4 Digital Audio in 2001. To be honest, that jump in power was quite amazing, though.
now THIS is the action retro I love.
I once bought a SuperMac C500 for a friend to do some graphics work and it was a pretty nice little machine and a decent value at the time, nearing the end of the clone era.
My favorite Mac Clone had to be PowerComputing. I grew up with PowerComputing machines during that era, so there's a ton of nostalgia!
6:53 - I LOL'ed at this... "16gb on an adapter, on another adapter... as is tradition" LOL - oh the joys of retro computing mixed with newer technology.
it was my first Mac in 97, and I loved it! You had to remember Macs were very expensive back then, so that was my "cheap" entry into the Mac world. Mine worked great it was equivalent to a Power Mac 4400, I used it for music production and never had any problems with it! i used to run Digital Performer, Photoshop, Rebirth with no problem!
As someone who was stuck with a 6200 series Performa when this system was on the market, I would have been very happy with one, I think. It sucked realizing that the technically older Power Mac 6100/60s at my school were faster than my 75 MHz Performa. I used to drool over the StarMax in the catalogues, especially the 5000 model. I kind of liked the case design too.
A motherboard only a mother could -board- love...
Love it. These came out when I was 12. My stepfather was a Mac fanatic but even he admitted late 90s macs were garbage.
I worked for Motorola in the early/mid 90s. The radio division in the IT department and bought some of these. They were perfectly fine for most users who were doing nothing more than writing documents or spreadsheets. Anything more would have been expensive overkill. Plus, PCs were taking over (oddly needing more support than the macs ever did).
I remember everyone being very excited about the Motorola Mac OS motherboards, though I can't remember exactly why. We owned a couple Power Computing machines. I've got a Umax C500 in my collection. Fun little machine.
my first computer was an apple that ran DOS and mac os, not at the same time, it was a 386 and a clone in one case, and you had to choose what side you wanted to power up and use at a time.
All I know about Mac systems of the 90s is that you are legally required to run teapots.
It's usually a good idea to find out what type and size of RAM modules any computer will accept BEFORE throwing a few random ones in and complaing they don't work. You could also check what sized HDD the OS supports out of the box, and maybe even pre-partition beforehand if necessary. Things tend to go much better that way. Sorry, I forgot... this is Action Retro we're talking about. 😂
😆
I bought my Umax right in front of Apple's Headquarters. With the money I saved, I decked it up and got a 17" "almost" flat Sony CRT monitor. Great machine, traveled the world around with me.
The only remnant of OG Motorola these days is Motorola Solutions. in 2011 they split into two companies (Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions) but the mobility company was sold to Google then Lenovo. Motorola Solutions makes communication equipment for fire, ambulance and police services, as well as for many Western and NATO military.
love your channel, great videos. is there a video for ide to cf card? I want to put that in my old g4 400. I think the ide drives will die soon.
I had a Starmax clone and I absolutely loved it. It saved me from having to go back to Windows after discovering Mac in college. It was affordable and lasted me well into the early 2000s when I upgraded to iMac.
For a while the company i was working for had the mobile repair contract for these things. I fixed a grand total of 2 of them.
No one:
Absolutely no one:
Retro computer enthusiasts: so I replaced the HDD with a compact flash drive
I love how you just nonchalantly announce how you made computer hardware from the late 90s run Mac OS 10.
Lots of late 90s Macs can run Mac OS X.
@@tookitogo Any of them with a PCI architecture can, even if is isn't supported.
I have the Motorola StarMax 4000 MT, and of course, I also installed BeOS on it. 😉 In spite of the turdiness mentioned in the video, I still love mine. I consider it to be better than the Performa 6220CD I used to have in my 20s, though, since that PowerPC Mac couldn't even load other OSes. I even had Debian Linux running on the StarMax 4000 for a long time in the mid-2000s and loved it.
That starmax reminds me of the Sun Microsystem Sparcstation 10 pizza box Unix machine I used to have with Solaris 9. Has that kind of vibe. But I think the Sun was slower.. much much slower
I am weirdly disappointed that you didn't give the PC a "thonk" when you were gesturing towards it.
I would love one of these! I had one long ago and it was thrown away after I moved out from my parent's house
I was a happy Motorola Starmax customer. Was it the best Mac we ever owned in our shop? nope. Why did we like it? the 5 year warranty. Yes, FIVE YEARS. The warranty lasted longer than Motorola in the market. We used that warranty four years in, and they fixed it, no questions asked. Also, the machine is upgradeable to G3 via Vimage or other G3 cache card upgrades, so our Starmax machines had long lives.
Weren't those logic boards from the PowerMac 4400? Had a UMAX S900 that was a lot of fun. Oh, man, Now Software!
I too comment before watching the entire video
I'd say this video is a grsat showcase of BeOS. Amazing how everything cjanged from being choppy to fluent. You wouldn't guess is the same computer.
When I was young and still lived with my parents so had an Atari ST still as my only system but was a graphic designer using Macs at work. The Mac clones were very tempting at the time, then Steve Jobs returned to Apple, killed the clones and brought out the iMac and G3 systems. My first Mac was a 300Mhz G3 desktop
My dad has a StarTac but I did have a Motorola flip phone myself, a V710.
I have the StarMax 5000/300. Yeah, ram is very specific, Fetch earlier than v3 doesn’t work, and you need the Ethernet driver and CD driver from the install disk for Mac OS 8 and 9 (a 10MBit card), but it otherwise operates wonderfully.
Apple's own machines sucked back in the mid 90s. You either paid a fortune for a Quadra/Centris or you lived with a slow-ass 68LC040 or even a 68030, a chip that was almost 10 years old when Apple stopped using it. The early PowerPC Macs weren't a whole lot better. Yeah, they could outperform a 68040 when they ran native PPC code, but when they had to run 68k software, (which a majority of Mac software was at the time) they were actually slower.
Comparing that Umax to the Starmax is a bit unfair. The Umax was a high-end 604e machine, while the Starmax was a low-end 603e machine (with a major price difference between the two as well), and the limitations of that Starmax were shared by most 603e machines of the era. That doesn't mean the Starmax didn't suck in plenty of other ways, but that's like comparing a Powermac 6400 to a Powermac 9600.
I had a dual cpu UMAX & it was fantastic....
Is there a version of BeOS or Haiku for PowerPC? I might do a live install at VCF East... ;)
BeOS was designed to run on PowerPC hardware. Don’t know if they ever ported it to Intel, but I’m not aware of it if they did. In fact, Be’s own computer the BeBox was a dual PPC machine. I owned one once. As far as Haiku, pretty sure it’s Intel only.
@@notajp cool, does that mean I could install it on my Power Mac G4 MDD?
Well, I guess a redeeming quality of this laptop is that if you had a much older mac and used this (by a friend's computer or you not knowing that a cheaper machine was faster), you'll still think it was an upgrade. And having a more standard PS2 is quite cool actually.
I think when this came out, the seller in the store responded: "Yep, it's the only "Mac" we have in store today. But we have some typing machines if you aren't interested..." :)
It took me a long time but I found out a way to get a SSD recognized on my StarMax. I use a StarTech SATA to IDE adapter and Lexar SSD. The only way I could get Disk Setup to recognize the drive was by booting with a OS 8 Disk Tools floppy. I easily spent a week trying different configurations, adapter, etc. I just started doing anything I could think of when I stumbled across that solution. I formatted the SSD into several partitions and successfully installed 7.6, 8.5, and 9.1.
The only issue with the SSD is the cdrom drive is no longer recognized when I use it. If I swap the original HHD back then the cdrom drive works.
I tried every extension I could think of. I changed jumper settings. You name it. I haven’t been able to figure out a way to get the cdrom drive to work.
Unrelated question, where'd you get the shirt from?
finding the best software for each machine is the key...I always do this for every machine!
i love the fact that the only reason why 3rd party failed was because the clones were objectively better then apple, proving that even back then apple had no idea what they were doing
Tbh if apple today would license macos to 3rd parties, their whole macbook and mac Market would die instantly
@@harisalic2568lmao, the laptop space is honestly their strong hold, no. My M1 Max has about 3080 performance. I know because I play my windows steam library on it via proton.
I’ll never understand irrational hate of Apple, when there’s so much to actually rationally hate!
The pre-return of Steve Jobs Apple did not, indeed, know what they were doing. Licensing was one of their bonehead decisions that Jobs had to fix.
@@jessepatterson8897proton on macos? 3080 performance? 😂😂 Go back to sleep big boi.
@@jessepatterson8897 I wish there were Apple Silicon machines that aren't Macs and something more repairable. And probably something that comes without OS X.
I think these systems have a valued place in the retro community. They may not be good, or fast but they still run vintage Mac OS on real hardware so you get the benefits and drawbacks.
4:19 "This is the PCBWay."
Well, now I want to pull my old Power Macintosh 4400 off the shelf and see if I can revive it.
I thought for sure you'd pop a PCI-based CPU upgrade! :D
TIL the Road Appleiest of Road Apples, the Power Mac 7220, shares a logic board with these mad StarMax things. But without the modicum of usefulness of PS/2 and VGA! Although PS/2 hardware on a Mac (even a clone) seems like it should be against some sort of rule.
I had a star max with a cache card g3 upgrade at 233 mhz it was the first g3 I ever had
the umax is just like how quark from the bar feels it.. if you catch my drift xd
I too was very surprised by how bad the StarMax machines were. Just awful.
Possibly since the machine could only see 8 gig of the 16 gig card maybe a smaller card would have been able to work. Something up to or under 8 gb? Or maybe pre-partition the 16 gig card down to 8 or less gigs before putting it in the machine?
The price was lower on StarMax if I remember correctly, that's why some bought this machines
Aw, the Motorola Starmax was the first Macintosh computer I was able to afford to buy on my own!
That's a Sony Ericsson flip phone.
I was waiting for someone to catch that
I worked in a phone shop for 15 years. Ain't slipping that past me 😄
how I would love to have a recycling centre or similar in my country to go and pick up old computers and mess with them
They sold these at Fry's Electronics for awhile! When they closed them out for bottom dollar... I think _still_ nobody bought them!
The Motorola Starmax was my biggest computer mistake in the 1990s. I had an Gravis MT200, which is a German version of the Umax C900, but only with a PPC 6003/200 MHz. I thought it would be a good idea to buy that Starmax instead with a PC 604/240. I was very disappointed that the Gravis/Umax was the better machine. I think I had it for less than a year before I bought again something from Apple.
"The CPU is soldered to the motherboard." Looks like Apple hasn't changed.
The Tanzania board that so many of the clones used had the option of being used that way or having a CPU socket, but these were low-end machines and most of them just used a soldered CPU.