What personal computers, if any, are manufactured presently which are neither Macs nor PCs?
-FrL-
There’s that Walmart GeOs one…
By “PC”, do you mean “runs Windows,” or “x86 architecture?”
I believe I mean “x86 architecture.”
What alternatives are there desktop or laptop computing that do not have either x86 chip architecture or Apple’s architecture (whatever that is called) but instead something else?
Thats a PC, too. Just one running Linux.
There isn’t really a clear line any more - Macs use Intel processors and can run traditional PC operating systems (Windows, Linux, Solaris). OS X can be made to run on PC hardware.
PowerPC systems are still available as an alternative hardware platform, but they are expensive.
Si
I own an Amiga 1200, that I use for music. but it was built 15 years ago and I don’t think there are newer models.
Here’s an article about Psion which apparently was the last computer built with original architecture. That was in 1997.
I don’t think there’s been a real third platform since they stopped building BeBoxes. Those were PowerPC-based (like the old PowerMacs) but ran BeOS (and couldn’t run MacOS because they didn’t have the necessary ROM.)
There was a brief period when Mac clones were manufactured by Power Computing, UMAX and others. They ran MacOS but weren’t really considered Macs.
There was the aforementioned Amiga platform. Sun SPARCStations. Various workstations from Silicon Graphics, etc. Nowadays almost all non-x86 hardware platforms are relegated to servers and supercomputers.
The answer depends on what you consider to be a desktop or laptop computer.
An EFIKA OpenClient is a desktop system that, although PowerPC-based, is not capable of running Mac OS.
The Nokia 810 tablet is an ARM-based handheld device that runs Linux.
Both can be purchased now, but non-x86, non-PowerPC systems in traditional desktop and laptop forms are pretty much gone.
This thread reminds me of my old Atari 520 ST. Pre-Internet, so I didn’t really do anything with it. Made fractals (which were popular at the time), and played Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and mostly used it as a word processor.
Old Commodore 64s and 128s are still available used.
The first computer I had in 1981 was a Commodore VIC-20. Cool machine for it’s time, but don’t think you really would want it now. It had a resounding 5K of memory. 
OTOH, the OS was on a ROM chip, so it booted up in a matter of seconds.
Sun machines have a patented SPARC processor although there are some newer Sun machines with AMD and Intel processors.
I have a ZX81. Does that count? 
[sub]I’m not posting from it, though. The Ethernet stack on the ZX81 is a little wonky, and I prefer to use my Mac.[/sub]
There used to be Acorns until 2000.
The ethernet stack can’t be any wonkier than the 16Kb memory expansion pack 
Si
There’s usually some fly-by-night company in Germany where a personal computer is being manufactured for some alternative non-80X86-based operating system - something like a much-modified version of the Atari ST or Amiga OS. Germans seem quite fond of offbeat operating systems, for some reason.
EDIT: Yup. Looked on Wikipedia, and there’s both a Dutch and German company making Amiga clones.
EDIT 2: And a German company (Medusa) that makes Atari ST clones. Seriously, what is it with Germans and oddball operating systems?
Both Amiga and Atari ST had a good reputation for music creation maybe they’re being manufactured for that market. I don’t know how conservative music makers are. IIRC White Town’s hit Your Woman was created using an Amiga.
“Are there Personal Computers that aren’t PCs (i.e Personal Computers)”
No, I don’t think that is possible.
That’s nothing; what about Russian near-clones of Western computers?
Even most of the companies making high end servers with proprietary architecture (Sun, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett-Packard) are moving away from proprietary architectures. Sun still offers membes of the SPARC family architecture for high end computing but has gotten thick into Intel-based servers for the commodity server market. SGI, of course, is out of business, taking with it their proprietary MIPS architecture, but they were already attempting to migrate away from that, and their particular flavor of Unix, IRIX, several years before. HP is ready to stop producing the PA-RISC and move to an Intel-based architecture. Motorola is pretty much out of the personal computing business, and overall, the PowerPC and other RISC architectures have been pretty much abandoned for desktop and laptop computing with the demise of the DEC Alpha and Apple moving from the PowerPC to Intel Core architecture. Even the once mighty Cray (or rather, what has become of it after several buyouts and sell-offs) is using AMD x86-64 processors to build massively parallel processing machines, something Seymour Cray once derided (but eventually embraced).
The weirdest thing I ever saw, though, was SGI’s attempt to build a portable high end computing workstation. Imagine the largest laptop you ever saw in a bluish-purple color with fans poking out the back, a gorgeous (for the day) LCD screen, and ultimately less computing power than a modern G4 Powerbook or MacBook Pro. It’s yours for around $70k. Unsurprisingly, they never offered it for sale. T’was an impressive item for it’s day, though, and beat lugging an Octane and it’s Trinitron monitor around.
Stranger
The portable Commadore 64 was fairly mad too.
Personal computers/workstations these days only run x86. There is also the Crusoe architecture, but it emulates x86 so don’t know if that counts. As recently as a decade ago you had Windows NT running on Alpha, and it was damn fast. Then Intel came along and said, “in the future, we will all use Itanium.” This scared the crap out of many cpu manufacturers. The alpha was killed off, as well as a few other chips. In the end, Itanium came late and was a pretty bad chip and completely failed to replace x86 on the desktop or even the server (except for a few niches).
Different architectures show up, however, when you scale either down or up. Scaling down you have ARM, xScale, and a couple others. PDAs, cell phones, and other riffraff use these chips. Scaling up you have (in terms of popularity) POWER, SPARC, and finally Itanium. Big servers use these chips. Supercomputers typically use x86.
But lest you think chip architecture invention has ground to a halt, amazing progress goes on in the realm of GPUs. Every few years the chips get completely redesigned since there’s zero worries about binary backward compatibility (everything that needs to be is dynamically recompiled by the driver). On top of that, the GPU architectures are unlike anything in the CPU world. As GPU paradigms are exploited for general purpose calculations, they’ll start to move into CPUs too.
Basically, what was once an active area of development has instead stepped aside to new frontiers. I think maybe even pursuing alternate architectures may have always been a pointless show of “differentiating” yourself. E.g., did apple really ever need to use powerpc (at least in the past decade, decade and a half)?