Apple Acquires Zayante

pinqkandi writes "Apple purchased Zayante, a big name in the FireWire/i.Link/IEEE 1394 community. Apple hopes to increase its FireWire presence with this purchase, or, in their own words, 'By acquiring Zayante, Apple is extending its commitment to FireWire as the premiere, high-speed digital interface solution.' Interestingly enough, Zayante works a great deal with Windows FireWire integration ... Windows-compatible iPod anyone?"

Comments

Gigawire?

[Tokerat]

Any chance this has something to do with the next revision of FireWire (Gigawire)?

I really have no idea, I'm not suggesting anything...

old news

[cappadocius]

I thought XPlay settled the whole iPod for Windoze thing.

btw: this has been up on Apple's news page for quite some time. The article is dated 12 days ago.

Re:old news

[johnpaul191]

xplay is not the only iPod on windoze solution.... though from what i understand none of them really have the integration that the device has with a Mac. i'm pretty sure it is not much more than running the hack to reveal the /mp3 directory on the iPod drive (hidden by default for lofi anti-piracy reasons (apple legal's idea?)). the device then shows up as an external drive. there is also *nix support in existance or on the way. from what i remember, same thing.... shows up like an external drive. think i read that here a while back actually?

the auto sysnc features with itunes will not work without an Apple (duh, itunes mac only). it still is a cool device with other platforms, but still more features on a mac. because of the drive formatting, i don't think it can be used as a boot drive on anything but a Mac either.

Re:old news

[Bklyn]

i'm pretty sure it is not much more than running the hack to reveal the /mp3 directory on the iPod drive

Not exactly. Xplay is basically three things. It allows you to access your iPod as a removable hard drive (via the "MacDrive" software which Xplay includes) so you can copy any sort of files onto or off of it. It also includes an Explorer plugin which allows you to browse your MP3s as they are catalogged in iPod-land (by playlist, song title, artist or album) and to drag and drop new MP3s into the Songs "folder" to add them to the iPod; I believe you can also create and update your playlists this way. Finally, it adds support for the iPod as a removable device to the Windows Media Player, so you can use its woeful features to manage your music. In the latest release there is also support for updating the iPod's firmware and recovering the iPod music database (it doesn't simply store things in a simple directory structure), which is often necessary because of the frequent FireWire bus lockups and write-behind errors you'll get with Xplay and Windows (these are apparently mostly Windows' fault and not Xplay's).

iTunes blows away Media Player in terms of usability, but if you have your MP3s stored on a Windows box like me and just want to get them onto your iPod, Xplay is the best software available right now.

Oldness

[Anonymous Coward]

This is two weeks old. Also, it would be nice if you included a link that actually included some information about the topic at hand, rather than saying "company Y acquired company Z" and linking to the companies' home pages, which have no information whatsoever.

Just a friendly tip from your local ReTaRd.

Re:Oldness

[usr122122121]

I, and probably many others, submitted this story when it first came out weeks ago.
I'm guessing that it didn't really seem interesting to whoever was moderating submissions that day.
Can't blame them though.

oh god i hope not

[paradesign]

the ipod should stay mac only. if you want one, buy a mac. look at how much shit is incompatable with the mac, basicly because companys are too cheap to port their drivers to mac.

I see the ipod as apples way of saying thanks to the mac faithful, by giving us the coolest gadget of the year.

Terrible move

[Anonymous Coward]

This now puts Apple in direct competition with Oxford Semi, LSI, and TI - the other Firewire chip makers. Even if they'd never ever ever put non-Zayante chips in macs, Apple is now trying to compete with Oxford and the others for Sony and everyone else's Firewire dollars now that USB2.0 is out. Not that it's the same thing for all uses, but it will give many pause to consider it, and it will work for 95% of what computer users would want a high-speed interface for. They want more people using Firewire, not less. Or that's what I used to think....

Re:Terrible move

[teener]

Not so. Apple is not an IC manufacturer ... it's a systems house. Zayante also was not an IC manufacturer, we were a provider of technology (IC designs, software, etc.) Some of the big IC houses licensed our designs for 1394b parts (Agere, for instance). There is no competition here ...

BTW, many of the current Firewire IC houses got their start by licensing the designs that our team did while we were at Apple the first time. TI, Philips, Fujifilm, LSI Logic, Sony and Adaptec all started by licensing the Firewire designs that were developed at Apple from 1990-95. Only IBM, Fujitsu and AT&T/Lucent/Agere did independent designs back then.

Oxford, BTW, is an excellent little company, and the whole FW community thinks very well of them.

... Mike Teener, ex-CTO Zayante, ex-Godfather of Firewire.

Eeeew

[Perdo]

Apple is going for a firewire monopoly. If a drive manufacturer did this with IDE or SCSI, we would be up in arms. But apple users are used to dealing with the apple proprietary hardware monopoly, and no one else cares.

Long live USB 2.0, the open standard.

Re:Eeeew

[Perdo]

Thank you SOOOOO much! 5% of the desktop market and STILL DROPPING, and these bucket heads seem to over run Slashdot. You would think they have 90% market share, but the only market they seem to have cornered is the market on suckers.

Re:Eeeew

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, Apple is going to buy up TI next... then they'll only have two other major corporations to absorb before they hold a "monopoly" on a technology they own the patent for.

Wow, when you look at it like that, the enormity of your stupidity comes right to the fore.

Go reboot your commodity piece of shit.

Re:Eeeew

[Lars T.]

Could be worse, could be morons like you.

Re:Eeeew

[Lars T.]

If you look more closely, you will see Macs being faster at some things than PCs. That, and they don't run Windoze.

Re:Eeeew

[Perdo]

Insightful? Mac Zealot mod! FLAMEBAIT!

Should I reboot my Alpha?
Should I reboot my three VA Linux rack mounts?
Should I reboot my 180 Macs of various flavors?
Should I reboot my 3 1.4 ghz+ athlons?

Apple had an "unfavorable" license agreement on the patents in their portfolio in reference to IEEE 1394. Apple does not own all the patents for IEEE 1394. Sony owns some of them and call the standard "i.Link". Apple owns the name "Firewire" but "1394 LA" owns the IEEE 1394 standard. 1394 LA charges .25 cents per IEEE 1394 device. The price is low, so as to compete with USB, which is a truly open standard for all versions.

So, Apple is seeking to own through production something that they only half own through intellectual property terms.

There are a few companies that seek to monopolize their markets. Microsoft monopolizes software on commodity hardware. Intel had an x86 monopoly prior to AMD's introduction of the Athlon. Rambus attempted to monopolize all current generation memory types for all hardware. Apple seeks to monopolize desktop publishing/graphic art, amateur DV editing and hopes to regain their monopoly in K-12 education.

As long as I have an IT budget and some morality, I will vote with my dollars against immoral business practices. I inherited 180 macs that are absolute pieces of shit compared to what was available from "commodity" hardware vendors from the same time period, especially for the price that was paid for them. I cherish the few clones in my mac inventory for their quality and upgrade ability. It is a mac myth that Apple stopped licensing their hardware to outside vendors on the basis of clones ruining Apple's image of quality. The clones had superior quality to what apple was offering at the time. In most cases, clones offered identical performance for half the price and much better upgrade ability. Apple likes their customers to be forced to buy a whole new machine instead of just upgrading the parts that are deficient.

As it stands, Apple has not advanced the internals of their hardware in two years. The Gamecube, with a 485mhz G3 that implements a partial altivec instruction set, retails for $199. The 500mhz G3 iMac retails for $800. A game console has cought up with a mac for performance.

ATA 66? 100mhz fsb? 1000mhz from a processor that performs clock for clock the same as a Pentium III? SDRAM?

Those of you that love your macs, love them for their gloss, not their performance or price. Those of you that are Mac zealots, have been steamrolled by the Apple marketing machine.

Example:

Let's pit 3 dual processor 1533mhz athlon XPs against 1 800mhz G4. Price point is $1600

In one corner, you have a single bottom end apple G4 tower at 800 mhz.

800MHz PowerPC G4
256K L2
cache
256MB SDRAM memory
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW drive
ATI Radeon 7500
56K internal modem

In the other corner we have 3u of Dual processor athlon goodness.

3 tyan tiger AMD 760mp chipset motherboards @ $504.
6 1800XP Athlons @ $303 (yes, they work).
3 256mb PC2100 registered ecc DDR ram @ $195.
3 1u cases w/300w power supplies @ $120.
3 40gb hard drives @ $159.

Price point is $1281.

Now rewrite your code.

Which takes 3 weeks, by which time Apple raises the price of the G4 another hundred dollars while the price of the cluster drops a hundred dollars.
(please note that in a previous version of this post I made that prediction, when in fact the price has dropped by over $300.)

Ok, that was a flame, let's stick to matters at hand.(Turned out to be not enough of a flame)

Referencing the altivec article, the ars technica article and the c't article (you know which one I'm talking about, that place where you dare not look, you'll find x86 there staring back at you) we can draw these assumptions:

The G4 with Altivec performs equally clock for clock with x86 w/SSE with some rare exceptions where it performs 100% faster clock for clock.

best case scenario for our similar priced systems using the best case for the G4 benchmark, rc5:

Single G4 800mhz 8,243,188 keys per second
6 AMD 1800XP 32,987,538 keys per second

300 dollars less expensive, x86 is 4 times as productive.

Seti@home using Ars Lambchop benching wu: Identical!

3.35 per work unit.

x86 is 6 times as productive for 300 dollars less.

CINT2000: base 648 - XP1800
CINT2000: base 242 - G4 800mhz

684 vs 242... and that is a single processor comparison!

If we can optimize to scale, x86 is 16 times as fast for 300 dollars less.

If you know of any benchmarks where Mac can compare favorably for the price, please let us all know. You are right, Mhz is not everything. But you have to get some numbers to back the claim that the G4 is even marginally close in performance to machines with well over twice the clock speed. I'm sure that will convince us all to run out and buy Macs for number crunching :)...

This is where your love of Apple has led the company. You buy blindly so they sell overpriced shit and call it gold.

Debating Mac zealots is so easy because a Mac zealot's mind is weak enough to believe the Apple marketing lies.

Re:Eeeew

[teener]

1) No monopoly ... Sony, TI, Panasonic, and a gaggle of others own bits of the IEEE 1394 technology (hence, there is a patent pool somewhat like MPEG and PCI). Zayante had significant presence in the 1394b (800mbit/sec -> 3.2 Gbit/sec) work, but so did Intel, HP, TI and Agere.

2) 1394 *is* the open standard. It was developed using IEEE rules (fully open meetings, just show up, no NDAs, no invitations required, patents must be disclosed). USB was an invitation-only thing. Apple tried to get involved with the USB 1.0 effort back in 1995 but was rebuffed ("first publicly drop ADB and Firewire and then we'll let you join the club"). I was the technical lead on Firewire at Apple from 1990 - 96, and was a founder of Zayante. There is no attempt at a monopoly, just an attempt to do a superior job.