It definitely makes Apple's decision to never allow generics seem wise in retrospect.

But they did at one point in the late 90’s. I wouldn’t say that was the only reason why they nearly went bankrupt, but it certainly didn’t help.

Yeah, "never" was the wrong word. I forgot about that.

In a way, they themselves started becoming a manufacturer of "IBM compatibles", they just locked their OS to them.

A Jobs-less alternate Apple universe might've been interesting though. He both canned the licensed Apple clones and made OpenStep into the next major MacOS revision. If Copland would've been OS 8 or BeOS as OS X, there could be viable clones, and thus maybe enough critical mass to keep PowerPC alive a bit longer.