Outline
Apricot Computers is a British manufacturer of business personal computers, originally founded in 1965 as "Applied Computer Techniques" (ACT), later changing its name to Apricot Computers, Ltd. It was a wholly owned UK company until it was acquired in the early 1990s by the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, which hoped that Apricot would help them compete against Japanese PC manufacturers, in particular NEC which commanded over 50% of the Japanese market at the time. Mitsubishi eventually shut down the Apricot brand; a management buyout resulted in new company Network Si UK Ltd being formed. In 2008 a new, independent Apricot company was launched in the UK.
Apricot was an innovative computer hardware company, whose Birmingham R&D centre could build every aspect of a personal computer except for the integrated circuits (chips) themselves, from custom BIOS and system-level programming to the silk-screen of motherboards and metal-bending for internal chassis all the way to radio-frequency testing of a finished system. This coupled with a smart and aggressive engineering team allowed Apricot to be the first company in the world with several technical innovations including the first commercial shipment of an all-in-one system with a 3.5-inch floppy drive (ahead of Apple), while in the early 1990s they manufactured one of the world’s most secure x86-based PCs, sold exclusively to the UK government.
Their technical innovation led them down some paths which were technically advanced but proved to be highly disadvantageous in the marketplace. For example when IBM abandoned their ill-fated but technically superior Micro Channel Architecture (MCA), Apricot was the only other OEM using it, in the Apricot Qi and VX FT ranges of PCs. This left the company at a technical dead-end without the financial or market power which helped IBM survive the failure of MCA.
Apricot continued to experiment with unusual form-factors in a market dominated by standardised 'beige boxes'. They produced a range of high-availability servers (the VX and Shogun ranges) with integrated uninterruptible power supply (UPS), low-profile 'LANStation' PCs specifically designed for use on office networks, and diskless workstations booted over the network.
This long-running pattern of tenaciously investing in technical innovation and complete end-to-end system design and manufacture created technically excellent computers, but meant that Apricot was slow to adapt as the worldwide market grew and changed. By the mid 1990s major PC OEMs such as Compaq and Hewlett-Packard were outsourcing their own complete end-to-end system design and manufacture to Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) based in Taiwan, and were moving at least some of their manufacturing to cheaper locations overseas.
Apricot was very late in adopting this method of manufacturing, even though a motherboard designed and manufactured in Asia cost Apricot as little as a third of the cost of design and testing in Birmingham and manufacture in Scotland.
Apricot eventually tried to move to outsourcing but the market outpaced them, and MELCO closed the company down, selling off the final assets in 1999. A management buyout resulted in new company Network Si UK Ltd being formed.
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