In 1995, Apple execs saw that a large portion of the success by Microsoft and other PC companies was that they licensed their operating systems and technology to outside companies. Facing an ever-shrinking market share after the launch of Windows 95, Apple decided to license the Mac OS to a handful of other companies. These companies built Mac hardware 'clones,' with the theory being that doing so would expand the reach of the Mac OS into markets other than those where Apple traditionally focused. Unlike Microsoft, however, Apple decided to maintain some control over its licensees and the quality of their products by requiring that all clone motherboard designs be approved by Apple. The clone approach didn't work out as planned and Apple found itself competing against many of the clone vendors without any significant growth in its market share.

In 1997, shortly after the return of Steve Jobs to the fold, Apple used a clause in the clone contract (that all such deals would be renegotiated upon the release of Mac OS 8) to end future Mac clone models. As a result, the version of Mac OS 8 that shipped in 1997 was essentially Mac OS 7.7 and was much different from the intended release Apple had hoped to issue.

Copland, Be and the quest for a next generation OS

In the mid-1990s, as the Mac OS passed its tenth birthday, it was becoming clear that the OS was going to need some serious under-the-hood improvements in order to survive for another 10 years. Although Apple continued to produce a solid interface and a fairly reliable operating system, the Mac OS of the day was missing several core technologies that were beginning to appear on the seen in other operating systems. Advances such as protected memory, true virtual memory, modern memory management, true multi-processor support and other features that enabled increased performance and reliability were becoming the norm in other operating systems -- including Microsoft's Windows NT (which later became Windows 2000 and XP), NeXT Nextstep/Openstep, IBM's slowly fading OS/2 and Linux and other Unix variants.

Apple had planned for all these functions -- and more -- to be included in a next-generation version of the Mac OS code-named Copland Initially, Copland was supposed to ship in 1996. But when beta versions were made available to a small number of developers, many realized that this wasn't likely to happen. The project timeline slipped and Apple eventually decided to release incremental Mac OS upgrades that would slowly offer new user interface elements, a multi-threaded Finder, and all the other promised features over the course of several updates. Unfortunately, very few of those updates were ever released. As it became clear that turning the existing Mac OS into a fully modern operating system might be too much of a challenge, Apple froze development of any Copland features not already slated to be built into Mac Os 7.6 or 7.7. While some features (including an updated interface called Platinum and a multi-threaded Finder) got included, most of the next generation features never showed up. The mythic Copland was to be billed as Mac OS 8. Instead, Mac OS 8 was an incremental upgrade that included some of the interface features of Copland, but little of the underlying functions.