[sircastor]

Apparently Apple had expected that the clones would pick up the bottom end of the market - make Macs affordable to a broader range of people. While some of that no doubt happened, the greater profit was to be had in the upper end where Apple's margins were high, and Clone makers had a lot of room to undercut them.

The clone period was great in the sense of making Macs affordable to people, and really stretching the performance of systems. Power Computing was especially good at this and really gave Apple a run for its money.

At the end of the day, the vision of the Macintosh was a product where the hardware and the software were built in sync - the computer and the OS were the product together. The clone era never really fit in with this.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple he killed the clone program because it was killing Apple, and perhaps more importantly to him, it didn't correlate with his vision of computing.