Just when you thought the Clone Wars were long forgotten, up pops another reminder of the bloody corporate carnage that ensued when Steve Jobs retook Apple's helm. At the time, Apple was in dire financial straits, and a mishandled and ill-conceived Mac OS licensing program wasn't helping matters any; instead of making a few hundred bucks by selling a Mac, Apple was making about fifty bucks when the same customer bought a faster, cheaper Mac clone instead. So Steve made the tough (and, at the time, wildly unpopular) decision to end the Clone Era. The casualties were enormous. Motorola lost millions. Power Computing tried to shift to the Wintel space and died a horrible death. Umax fell back on its other business, but wrote off enormous losses due to the cancellation of cloning. Mayhem abounded.

Mactell, though, who was one of the smaller clonemakers, seemed to be able to transform into a fairly successful vendor of all kinds of Mac-related goodies-- graphics cards, processor upgrades, input devices, storage peripherals, and the like. Their web site lists a slew of exciting new products, and we figured Mactell managed to escape the Clone Wars, damaged but not disabled. So we were bummed to discover a Mactell press release announcing that the company is finally shutting its doors for good. The reason given? "Mactell has been attempting to work its way out of the problem created when Apple Computer, Inc. made the decision to discontinue the licensing of the Macintosh operating system... in August of 1997." Apparently the company's operating losses were substantial, and Mactell's debts are too high for them to continue doing business. Chalk up another casualty to the Clone Wars; Mactell managed to hang on for a couple of years, but finally gave up the ghost.

Then again, there's another factor to this whole equation; Mactell's demise may in fact be due less to the Clone Wars and more to what we call the Voodoo Curse. Gamers among you know that 3dfx makes a series of 3D accelerator chips called the Voodoo. Perhaps no one's noticed, but any company that tries to bring the power of the Voodoo chip to the Macintosh market winds up going under. First there was Techworks and their Voodoo 1-based Power3D; Techworks subsequently got bought out by a large company who ditched the Mac market, and the Power3D was gone. Then MicroConversions tried to bring us the Voodoo 2, but production problems, sky-high prices, and a badly botched rollout closed the company down. And now there's Mactell, who was poised to deliver the first Mac-specific Voodoo 3 card, the "EvilEye"-- dead before they could deliver. Coincidence? Hardly. Let's just hope that when the Voodoo 4 ships, whatever foolhardy Mac company that tries to deliver it fares better than its predecessors...