While we had already mentioned Umax's $30+ million loss on its whole Mac clone venture, we weren't aware that the company had officially called it quits. At least, that's what the San Francisco Chronicle claims; apparently a Umax spokewoman declared that the company will now sell Pentium-based computers, instead of Mac clones. (Whoa! Anyone else experiencing a frisson of déjà vu? Replace the name "Umax" with the name "Power Computing" and you've just stepped back in time...)

So that's it-- the end of the incredible embarrassment that was the Mac Cloning Era. Of course, the spectre of Mac cloning will likely stick around for a while; heck, Power Computing got bought out last October or whatever, and we're still seeing their systems sold in the mail-order catalogs. Umax's boxes will probably rattle around in the channel until the middle of next year or so.

Umax's exit from the Mac market shouldn't affect things too much, though; their big contribution recently has been in the lower-end consumer market, and the high-end graphics and video market. But Umax's 603-based consumer systems aren't nearly as attractive as they once were (thanks to Apple's refusal to certify G3-based clones, and the decent pricing on the Powermac G3's), and they would become truly irrelevant with the advent of the iMac, which will be cheaper, faster, and about a million times prettier. Similarly, Umax's main appeal in the graphics market is the availability of six-slot systems, which Apple currently lacks, but that may change this fall with Apple's high-end Gossamer II-based machines. (And if anyone desperately needs to buy a six-slot system in the meantime, we'd be glad to sell you the AtAT PowerTower Pro. ;-)