"[Apple] turned to [licensing Apple clones] because they didn't deliver to the high end well enough."
No, the inverse was true. Apple allowed licensing because they thought clone manufacturers would be satisfied building low profit margin entry level Mac clones. Apple wanted to stick to products with higher profit margins.
What ended up happening was that companies like DayStar and PowerComputing started building way faster, more extensible tower workstations than Apple's PowerMacs. Power users loved it and Apple's high end sales suffered for it.
On the low end workstation side, Apple's Power Macintosh 4400 was actually quite price competitive with the clone offerings of the day.
The 4400 was one of the first CHRP-type boxes. They used a Motorola made motherboard and usually had board headers for parallel and PS/2. The same board (or at least a variant) was used in Motorola StarMax machines, which were quite powerful for their price, except for the 40mhz system bus. I had a "PowerCity" which was an illegal clone made from leftover Motorola parts after the Jobs decision. It was a great machine, and it was nice to have a PS/2 port on mac at the time!
I remember it well. There was a lot of talk about CHRP, but in the end, Apple released no Macs that were fully based on it. The 4400 had the same Apple designed Tanzania motherboards [1] as Motorola used in some of their StarMax machines [2]. Those boards had support for commodity PC ports like PS/2 and parallel, as well as Apple's ports. The Power Macintosh 4400 did not have parallel or PS/2 connectors. It had ADB and GeoPort serial ports [3].
I considered getting a 4400, but I ended up spending a little more on a 7300, which was a way better computer.
No, the inverse was true. Apple allowed licensing because they thought clone manufacturers would be satisfied building low profit margin entry level Mac clones. Apple wanted to stick to products with higher profit margins.
What ended up happening was that companies like DayStar and PowerComputing started building way faster, more extensible tower workstations than Apple's PowerMacs. Power users loved it and Apple's high end sales suffered for it.
On the low end workstation side, Apple's Power Macintosh 4400 was actually quite price competitive with the clone offerings of the day.