Motorola's Half A**ed Macintosh

Thanks pcbway.com for sponsoring today's video!
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!
VIDEO LINKS:
🍎 Steve's StarMax video: • Motorola's LAST Macint...
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#Motorola #Apple #BeOS

[@EngineerOfChaos]

I zoned out for a brief moment and I see he installed BeOS in the meanwhile. That shouldn't surprise me.

[@smiththers2]

i knew as soon as he made a 2nd partition that OS shenanigans were going to happen lol

[@john_ace]

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.

[@chillinfartdotcc]

it explains the shape

[@ZeroHourProductions407]

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.

[@redstone0234]

Some of UMAX Clones where targeting the sub 1000$ Market This lead themselves to Continue having the Mac Clone licence

[@PhillyMJS]

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.

[@johncate9541]

@@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.

[@KarlBaron]

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.

[@3rdalbum]

​@@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.

[@mryon314159]

Can confirm, we had the Motorola machines in the office at Be and even then, they were, um, not our favourites.

[@Ariannus]

I was expecting "And here is Minecraft running on the worst Macintosh clone."

[@burts06]

Ik same

[@Jabjabs]

Time to bust out Classicube on BeOS!

[@kenon6968]

well shouldn't it be DOOM?

[@RWBHere]

@@kenon6968 lol

[@leandrotami]

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.

[@ActionRetro]

Thanks for this!!

[@RossComputerGuy]

Btw, not every CF card reports as removable. Check with the manufacturer or the drive properties in Windows before using it.

[@KarlBaron]

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!

[@InfernosReaper]

Yeah, I'd have just used a IDE to SD or even IDE to SATA m.2(which I have in my ibook)

[@eDoc2020]

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.

[@veronikagundersen9334]

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.

[@Great-Documentaries]

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).

[@DrTedEsq]

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!

[@georgeh6856]

Since Apple designed and created the logic board, it should not be "Motorola Sucks" but instead "Apple Sucks".

[@Jossandoval]

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.

[@georgeh6856]

@@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.

[@NextMomentOnEarth]

​@@Jossandovalthe sugar spinner could refuse to sell to them, and not put their name on a bad product

[@vojtechtomes6231]

Did you even watch the video dude?

[@Jossandoval]

@@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.

[@MaxOakland]

He mentions a bad startup sound but it's never shown in the whole video! I have to hear this

[@charliesretrocomputing]

SAME

[@themaritimegirl]

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.

[@3rdalbum]

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.

[@pum6454]

it probably goes "hello moto"

[@egbront1506]

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.

[@spencerdavies4666]

Ahhh Motorola, maker of my formative CPU (6809) then my favourite (68000). Happy days...

[@jessepatterson8897]

68k is the goat, responsible for more 8bit machines and consoles than anything but maybe the 8080?

[@fnjesusfreak]

@@jessepatterson8897 ...the 68000 was 32-bit from the beginning...

[@lexacutable]

​@@jessepatterson8897 are you thinking of the 6502?

[@Lixxide]

6809

[@MechanicaMenace]

​@@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.

[@bpmadmasta98]

We know what can Be But we really want to know Will he run Haiku?

[@dmug]

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

[@MichaelAStanhope]

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!

[@chadlawson9346]

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.

[@MichaelAStanhope]

@@chadlawson9346 Thats the Powermac 4400, that is the Apple equivelent to this machine.

[@zer0t1m3]

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

[@amberisvibin]

they co developed the powerpc chip too

[@alexhajnal107]

@@amberisvibin Along with IBM

[@Great-Documentaries]

In fairness, everything Apple made in this period was half-assed. Only a year earlier, ALL 16MB PowerMac's came bundled with SoftWindows to make up for the fact that your were buying an overpriced, shitty, one-button-moused computer with a half-assed operating system. Motorola, Power Computing and others made better hardware at a lower price, which forced Apple to throw their new partners under the bus by discontinuing the program. Millions wasted. Lessons learned.

[@NJRoadfan]

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.

[@BrianMaddox]

There’s a Motorola engineer shedding a tear right now you meanie 😂

[@MichaelAStanhope]

oh, and you wouldn't want an internal SCSI hard drive on this thing, the SCSI on here was SLOW AS HELL!!

[@cwcowell]

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.

[@extrameatsammich]

Who would have guessed that Apple would have designed a criminally compromised motherboard in the late '90s?

[@MaxOakland]

I'm surprised! That seems more like a mid-90s Apple thing

[@Ragnar8504]

@@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.

[@NautilusMortanian]

Motorola was a huge part of PowerPC though...

[@JeffWaynee]

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.

[@projectcafe_]

hello moto moment indeed

[@whophd]

“Unthinkable today” but we forget how many people were demanding Apple do cloning because Microsoft succeeded. If KZbin 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.

[@OldAussieAds]

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.

[@shmehfleh3115]

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.

[@jacobmckenna8661]

"We'll call this one Mototola Sux, and this one Motorola Sucks"

[@KarlBaron]

And then later it's called Motorola Suxxxxx

[@reidster87]

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.

[@iO-Sci]

I didn't have clue that Motorola developed a (''terrible'') and slowed MacOS computer XD. 나는 모토로라가 ('끔찍한'') 속도를 늦추는 MacOS 컴퓨터를 개발했다는 ​​사실을 전혀 몰랐습니다.

[@serenitysuccubus9231]

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

[@harisalic2568]

Tbh if apple today would license macos to 3rd parties, their whole macbook and mac Market would die instantly

[@jessepatterson8897]

@@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!

[@will_it_work]

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.

[@TerminalHeatSink]

​@@jessepatterson8897proton on macos? 3080 performance? 😂😂 Go back to sleep big boi.

[@a1batross_]

​@@jessepatterson8897 I wish there were Apple Silicon machines that aren't Macs and something more repairable. And probably something that comes without OS X.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Really enjoyable video, I had heard they where not great, liked getting to see BeOS running on it aswell.

[@Skibbi198]

No one: Absolutely no one: Retro computer enthusiasts: so I replaced the HDD with a compact flash drive

[@CubicleNate]

Anytime you say, "terrible" I get all excited. There was no question what to click next on KZbin!

[@QuadSix50]

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.

[@morecrappysketches]

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.

[@MegaManNeo]

Isn't that thing 68k based? Do you by chance actually have any versions of AmigaOS? You could look into it and see how these perform on this Mac clone.

[@ericwood3709]

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.

[@thedarkdragon89]

I'm also an Albuquerque native like Bill, I love that mugshot. I'm sure APD has it in a hall of fame somewhere.

[@matushorvath]

Um, so what exactly makes this the worst Mac clone? I must have missed the part where that is explained. Other than being old and slow and not supporting current hardware, which is not very surprising for a 25 year old computer.

[@shadowj5639]

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.

[@EnronnSierra]

In 1996, if this was a family computer, you were just gonna use it as is. You type up your documents in a bootleg copy of Word 5.1 your dad got from somebody at work; maybe you get a modem installed and binged on free AOL CDs to get on the net. Back then, before the computer became a hub device, you had a CD player, still rent videos from block buster, watch Power Rangers and X-MEN 97, hung out at the mall and spent just a lot of time away from a computer.

[@JosephHalder]

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.

[@HeyImGaminOverHere]

I am weirdly disappointed that you didn't give the PC a "thonk" when you were gesturing towards it.

[@dylang3998]

Love it. These came out when I was 12. My stepfather was a Mac fanatic but even he admitted late 90s macs were garbage.

[@Schoolofmonkey]

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 😂

[@RichsRandomRetroReviews]

FAKE! The flip phone was a Sony Ericsson!! lol Awesome video as usual

[@sundhaug92]

Also worth noting Be was founded by Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple-boss

[@TheSuperiorQuickscoper]

0:46 Android users getting rejected on Bumble because they don't have iMessage be like.

[@DhavidSetiawanKilluaDhavid]

Ahhh Motorola... Before they got handle by Lenovo for mobile devices.

[@rustkitty]

A motherboard only a mother could -board- love...

[@another3997]

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. 😂

[@normbrown3435]

😆

[@painreliever83]

That's a Sony Ericsson flip phone.

[@ActionRetro]

I was waiting for someone to catch that

[@painreliever83]

I worked in a phone shop for 15 years. Ain't slipping that past me 😄

[@AaronPaluzzi]

This is my terrible conspiracy theory: Motorola cranked out this turd because they were still crunchy about Apple shifting from 680x0 to PPC. Correction: since apple made these maybe apple was taking revenge on Motorola for 68k shortages

[@ActionRetro]

Where’s my tin foil hat!

[@kylek6922]

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.

[@majinshinsa]

All I know about Mac systems of the 90s is that you are legally required to run teapots.

[@that_colin_guy]

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.

[@Plasmacore_V]

"The CPU is soldered to the motherboard." Looks like Apple hasn't changed.

[@johncate9541]

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.

[@RichardFraser-y9t]

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.

[@m4dizzle]

So the problem was Mac OS? No surprises there 😅

[@WilliamHaisch]

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.

[@3rdalbum]

They did issue a license for Mac OS 8 - to Power Computing, I think?

[@WilliamHaisch]

@@3rdalbum If so, it could be one reason why Power Computing was acquired by Apple in late 1997.

[@redstone0234]

@@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

[@stinkertonsden]

"His Royal Highness Motorola" - encapsulates why Motorola left the computing market fairly quickly.

[@SimonZerafa]

But can it run Haiku? Or Doom? 😁🤷‍♂️

[@AlejodelosReyes]

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.

[@Zarkovision]

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.

[@choppergirl]

I had 3 or 4 of these StarMacs as well as an ocean of Apple Macs. Like barnfulls. It was kind of nice they used PC monitors and a PC keyboard and mouse. Most of it is rusting away by now. The problem was Mac had jumped to PowerPC which was RISC and ran not so great compared to the old 68040. Yes, faster, but not by a massive margine. All the other Macs with PowerPC's were just as mediocre. There is no problem chaining SCSI drives, you can do like up to 7 devices on one cable, so that complaint is invalid. You just had to make sure it was terminated at the end and flip the right dip switches on each drive to not conflict with each other. If you were a Mac Person you were already use to doing this.

[@jperih]

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.

[@Scott__C]

Weren't those logic boards from the PowerMac 4400? Had a UMAX S900 that was a lot of fun. Oh, man, Now Software!

[@jessepatterson8897]

I too comment before watching the entire video

[@james_lockman]

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.

[@rogerlundstrom6926]

.. How can someone make a terrible clone.. if the original was terrible?.. ESPECIALLY if the people who made the "Terrible" clone.. LITERALLY was the core of the actual.. original?.. you DO know that Motorola pretty much presented MOST of the vital circuitry AND components (especially the processor).. for the Apple Mac?.. I mean.. TECHNICALLY Apple's Macintosh WAS horrible on the face and horrible if you dug deeper.. and.. you expect a CLONE of it to NOT be horrible?

[@jessepatterson8897]

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.)

[@austina3567]

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.

[@jimi-w]

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.

[@Robert-we9jp]

Who were all the Mac clone makers. I know Power Computing, Umax, Motorola, Radius (not sure). Anyone else? Which ones were best, worst, in the middle? From reviews I have seen over the years I get the impression Umax, Power Computing, and Radius were OK.

[@DehnusNorder]

You mention what Motorola is known for and you do not mention the might 68000? SHAME! SHAAAAAAAME! Also MACS? Upgrading? WoW.. how times have changed :P .

[@jazzlover10000]

NeXT had dumped Motorola for Intel... then HP-PA... then Sun. All of the above for awhile. I think MOT was a bit put out! BeOS was a mess... it just wasn't done yet. Taligent and Kalaida had just finished up making the rounds. Yeah, Kalaida, right? hehe.

[@dhinostroza]

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.

[@ww21943]

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.

[@ErdrickHero]

Motorola makes good phones nowadays, comparable in power to (and more durable than) Samsung flagships, but way cheaper and with less bloat. Motos even still have headphone jacks!

[@jakewisher4623]

If I remember correctly you need 3.3v EDO (not PC100 or PC133!) 168pin ram sticks - 5v EDO sticks probably won't work either

[@Revenant_Knight]

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.

[@stephanemignot100]

I guess Sheepshaver is based on these clones, crappy sound, always crash etc...BasiliskII for the win, 68k forever! Even if my LCIII is dying somewhere...

[@pianokeyjoe]

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

[@edised71]

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!

[@dominikschutz6300]

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..." :)

[@Tombowolf]

In all honesty and from a today's standpoint this would be a compelling machine for getting into the Mac scene. Coming from the IBM/WIntel side this computer has a pretty low hardware barrier. IDE drives, PS/2 Peripherals are cheap and plenty, straight out VGA thus no need for the usual adaptor hunting. Might be mediocre, but maybe that's the compelling thing as I would not have to hunt down all the additional high performance specialized peripherals and cables just to get a basic setup running.

[@ewasteredux]

I have an in-the-box original copy of BeOS 4.5 (CD and Floppy) with a BeOS bible text book. Know anyone that would want these? They would be free as long as shipping is cheap.

[@PhillyMJS]

3:06 I hated the bland, generic PC-clone design of the Power Mac 4400 on sight. TIL it was a piece of crap on the inside, too, so I feel vindicated. The mid 90s before Jobs came back really was Apple’s malaise era.

[@Cybernetic_Systems]

Fun video, but please check your pronunciation of KiCad, it’s actually pronounced KeyCad according to the the foundation.

[@Figuremakr]

Yup, C R A P. The video that highlights so much terrible in one spot. Too painful to watch. ...if only there was a newer comparable mac....cough cough. Cube. cough cough...

[@lugoismad]

would love to watch a version of this hosted by someone who was positive, instead of saying everything sucks, makes fun of internal to external SCSI adapter and then proceeds to use 2 different adapters to make CF work. Ugh. No one wants to hear the negativity. "Oh look how funny I am, I'm going to name both partitions motorola sucks, haha, people will definitely like me now!"

[@Vlad-1986]

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.

[@watchmakerful]

In Russian slang, such bad products from Motorola are often called "motožopa", where "žopa" is a vulgar Russian word for "a$$".

[@gwgtaylor]

I have to disagree a bit. I had a StarMax 4000 mini tower with 200 mhz 604e and that thing was great. I honestly loved it and was more than powerful enough for my needs at the time.

[@dennisp.2147]

Yeah, you should realy be blaming Apple for the Tanzania motherboard. Motorola's only fault is trusting Apple's motherboard.

[@notajp]

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.

[@johnunderwood43]

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.

[@jazzlover10000]

Would be nice to see you do something with these machines. Control BSR lights or turn on a blender with an appliance module maybe? Not to criticize you but it's everyone- nobody does any vintage computer YT videos that actually _do_ anything!

[@brianterrill9587]

Dude, look into 1rx8, 2rx8, 1rx16 etc, for various ram configs that WILL work.

[@hmbpnz]

I'm confused. Apple supplied the logic boards but you're just trashing Motorola? What's your deal?

[@plechaim]

I think you are being a bit harsh about the machine only being expandable to 116Mb in 1996, when 16Mb was considered a high amount of memory at the time and it was not uncommon to see machines in use with 4Mb or less. Simililarly with the hard drive being "a mediocre" at a time when 1Gb would have been absolutely top end.