So you probably thought that the whole Clone Wars drama was dead and buried, right? And who can blame you? It wasn't exactly the brightest spot in Apple's admittedly mottled history; an ill-defined cloning program simply allowed other companies to siphon away Apple's user base and profits, in exchange for a paltry licensing fee that, at least according to Steve Jobs, couldn't come close to covering Apple's own development costs for that same clone on a per-machine basis. So Steve did what some claim Steve does best: Steve "Steved." With no go-ahead from Apple to ship G3 systems or Mac OS 8, the cloners got squeezed right out of the market. In hindsight, it was a move that probably saved Apple, but for those of you who were paying attention when the whole thing came to a head late in the summer of 1997, you can probably remember the fierce division within the Mac OS community.

So, to a certain extent, the Clone Wars are kind of like the black sheep uncle doing time in Joliet for grand theft auto and fraud-- the whole family knows about it, but there's almost an unspoken agreement never to bring it up in polite conversation. But that's not stopping Umax chairman Frank Huang from dredging up the ugly past. Umax was one of the "Big Three" cloners, along with Power Computing and Motorola, who had to get gone from the Mac OS scene when Steve did the Steve thing. And Huang is vocal about his views on the whole incident; in a CNET article on Umax's upcoming handheld wireless stock-transaction appliances, he's quoted as saying that "Apple did not comply with the contract" and that "because of Steve Jobs [they] were forced to pull out of the market."

Sure, this isn't news to anyone, but it's noteworthy that the death of Mac cloning still makes the news every once in a while, even incidentally. We do feel sorry for the cloners like Huang, who generally got a pretty raw deal, but at the same time we're very glad that Apple's still around. In that spirit, we'd like to award Dr. Huang with the Obvious Statement of the Week award, for saying "it is very hard to deal with Steve Jobs." Sure it is, folks, but that's what makes him a star.