Pearcom sold its clone - the Pear II in much of Europe.
In the UK, continuing the fruit theme, we had Apricot computers who would never stoop to making Apple knockoffs - it made reassuringly expensive PC clones.
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If my memory does not fail me, Apricot (at least for a relatively long time) produced a line of almost but not quite clones.
They were much better well thought out in a number of aspects, but not 100% PC compatible at the HW level, so they needed their own version o fMS-DOS.
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I didn’t realise that - Wikipedia has some information:
The manufacturer did not completely clone the IBM BIOS, so although it ran MS-DOS and CP/M-86, it was not IBM PC compatible as the underlying system BIOS and hardware was very different.
An Intel 8089 I/O controller was used, instead of the Intel 8237 DMA chip used in IBM computers; the ROM was only a simple boot loader rather than a full BIOS; and there was no 640k barrier. The floppy disk format was “not quite compatible”; attempting to read an ordinary PC FAT floppy in an Apricot, or vice versa, would result in a scrambled directory listing with some files missing.
I remember using one of their 1980s scifi-looking machines with a beautiful orangey-amber display and an infra-red keyboard at university. It was the only one in the room that ran a half decent word processor.
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Not surprising in the least. Woz’s Apple ][ board design was elegant but easy to clone, as it had no programmable chips on it other than the ROMs, which could easily be dumped into hex files and programmed into EPROMs. The floppy board likewise had one TTL PROM that was easy to duplicate.
The Mac was developed more as an appliance. It was quickly reverse-engineered, as I and some others at a tiny company developed add-in graphics and 68020 boards.
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Did the original Mac have much in the way of custom chips aside from the ROMs? I know the 68000 had to do most of the heavy lifting which really hit performance.
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Aha! I found a photo of the Apricot machine I used to use - the F1. Look at that sleek design from 1984, makes me think of the Apple LCs that came along about a decade later:
In case you’re wondering what wizardry made such a tiny machine - that shadow on the right is hiding a lot of case extending off into the background.
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has a list of chips
Take away the ROM and you take away the soul of the machine.
I’ve always heard the IBM PC described in most disparaging terms for being nothing more than a BIOS coupled to an Intel reference board.
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The original Mac 512 had half a dozen PALs, which were early programmable logic devices. It was pretty easy to reverse engineer these. I was designing very similar M68000 VMEbus industrial computers at the time, so I designed similar logic myself back then.
There was also the IWM or Integrated Woz Machine, the custom floppy controller chip that was similar to that in the Apple IIe (I think).
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