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Zettabyte Shut Down
jpt.d writes "Zettabyte (those who put the SuperDrive in the eMac) have been shut down without detailed explaination. They only say, 'Due to Legal Restrictions we will no longer be able to sell our SuperDrive equipped eMac.' Does anyone have any more details about this?"
Have some self-respect! Don't be afraid to make it funny.
Apple, you are such a good company when you want to be. Why can't you allow people to assist you in giving the people what they want?
I used to agree with Bob Metcalfe that "Steve Jobs could do no wrong" but every now and then I have to eat his words and it is getting tired.
It could be an issue with the eMac being for eductional markets. Apple has had a long standing policy that resellers cannot sell Educational-market models to the general public, and so this could be where they were bitten. ( a good example is the "All-in-one G3" -- you can buy it from private sellers, of from eductional institiutions that are selling their, but you wuoudln't buy them from an Apple reseller unless you were and educator)
I can see why Zettabyte would not think this was an issue because Apple is selling them to the general public -- but they're still "educational products", methinks.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Apple has maintained strict control over its distribution rights regarding Macs. I would imagine that they felt that Zettabyte was 'out of bounds' by selling their 'customized' macs. I was unaware of Zettabyte before this, but I am assuming they just added parts to existing macs and resell them. This would be no surprise, given Apple's iron grip on the control of the Mac in general, from design to distribution. I personally think this is dumb of Apple, since more macs being sold = bigger market share = more people buying mac stuff now & in the future. It has its disadvantages and advantages, but in light of Apple's financial situation (they have not been on really solid ground for a couple years), I would say the long term benefits of wider usage outweigh the short-term problems & loss of control. Just my $0.02.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Go read MacCentral.
You will learn that Apple told them to stop selling the upgraded devices, and that now they are going to sell kits instead, and perhaps a service where customers can send in their eMac to get it upgraded. They are not "shut down" or closed, or out of business by any means.
I don't see the big deal in this at all. If someone were to take boxed Dells and modify them and resell them, I think Dell would have a problem with that too... But, then again, what about the rack mounted Quicksilvers that Terra Soft sells as the GVS 9000? They're repackaged Power Macs.
Honestly, I don't see why the heck people don't just buy an external DVD-R. SuperDrives are too slow anyways. It's convenient, yes, but limiting. The built-in CDRW is 24/16/32 or something like that. Aren't the SuperDrives 4 speed?
Ironically enough, you can still get to the order page by going here
Gabriel Ricard
. . . that Apple is their Un*x loving saviour from Bill's Evil Empire and Palladium would do well to note that their actions indicate they want to be just like Microsoft. They're just not as good at it.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Here's a link to the MacCentral Story from Yahoo.
blarg.
Can someone explain (for the benefit of those of us who are confused by such stuff) how company A can sell me product P, but then have the legal force to tell ME not to re-sell my P to someone else?
I don't get it. I can buy paper, write stuff on it, and sell it to someone else without a paper company coming after me. Why couldn't I buy a computer, modify it, and resell it? (provided I wasn't purporting to be Apple, etc...)
Or am I missing the point here...
myselfmusic
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=7 7&e=1&cid=77&u=/mc/20020729/tc_mc/legal_restrictio ns_stop_the_sale_of_superdrive_emac
i think the big issue is with someone selling a modified product, and calling it an emac.
the company that makes the rackable g4's doesnt call them powermac g4's, they have their own model name. and package them differently.
Apple sells the emacs to Zettybyte, apple doesnt care what happens to them, what they likely have the issue with is people buying these, thinking that they are supported by apple, when they are not.
Zettybyte doesnt call them the z-1000, they call them an apple emac, and likely ship the modified units in apple boxes, with apple documentation.
and buyers (at least a percentage) call apple for support on these machines, with voided warrantys.
this likely causes customer confusion, and dissatisfaction with the Apple Brand and is the reson for the halting of production.
apple is one of 2 pc makers to turn a profit this year. dell is the other.
ibm also did, but they do lots of things other then just pc's
MacCNN
Well, Apple did something to protect itself and now everyones goign to go screaming about how "its just this type of stuff that keeps macs costing $10,000 and rquiring a refrigerator compresser to cool them" or some equivilent nonesense.
Think about it.
This company was taking new machines, modifying them, and selling them.
How is apple supposed to provide warrantee work for them? How is apple supposed to deal with the damage to its brand when these machines don't work and the warrantee is violated?
If you're going to sell apple technology-- and this is true of Dell, and other brands, and any seller from TechData down to CompUSA you HAVE To have a license. No license, you don't get to sell.
Just as I can't go out and start selling high end Sony car stereos -- a license they only give to their biggest volume dealers-- Apple protecting its brand in this way is exactly what every hardware manufacturer in the world does as well.
Course this won't mean anything to the bigots that see apple as evil and don't understand business at all so they conjecture up some moral law that this supposedly violates. "SEE! This is what happens when you don't sell yourh ardware under GPL! You're a SLAVE TO STEVE JOBS!!!!"
Even the GPL is a *license*!
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
I bet....you couldn't sound any more dumb. That is all.
You really should look up the definition of troll in the jargon file, as you do fit it with that comment, though I can't say whether you are normally one (internet discussions just aren't worth it...win or lose it's just stupid). Just that people like you (or like you today, as you answered him with a time constraint, just don't add anything here and worsen the signal to noise ratio. So go on, throw a tantrum now and prove to us all how smart you are, use google or make some crazy claim about your education or employment, just get it over with and shutup. Please.
btw...that big blue box with the bright light is called outdoors, you should go there sometime. Here is where you become a sarcastic 12 yr old (again) and say that it's night where you are and there are no lights outside.....sigh
Maybe Apple objected because they were gray market machines? Like not sold by an authorized reseller like CompUSA or Microcenter? So maybe those resellers who were authorzied complained to Apple really loud that they go to all the trouble to be authorzied, and that Mr. Apple better shut down this un-authorized reseller? or maybe it was because they were illegally copying Apple's iDVD software? Apple does not sell iDVD as a finished good product - go ahead and look, I did. The only way to get iDVD is to buy a Mac with a SuperDrive, the iDVD 2 upgrade even says legally it is an upgrade for licensed owners of iDVD. Of course heaven forbid Apple protect their software rights...
This seems to be a issue of technicalities: If for instance Zettabyte obtained the machines from a reseller non specific to a reseller license, there would be no legal precident that I'm aware of that could stop the company from procuring the machines from thr open markets and retrofitting the machine with such upgrades, in that they would be covered by the first sale doctrine. Secondly Apple no longer owns the machine after they are sold; its hardware, and its not licensed to the consumer, the technicalities associated with iDVD do become revelant, though I have heard that Zettabyte ordered SuperDrive kits from Apple, as upgrades for existing units, and applied them to the eMac's and upgraded them, and in so doing iDVD was bundled with the upgraded SuperDrive... Now on the other hand if Zettabyte had a license to resell the machines from Apple or via one of Apples distributors, and it forbid the action of said company, then it would be a infringement upon their options and ways they could represent them to the public... Though it should be legal to represent things as they are, eMac -(Internal Drive) +(SuperDrive), or Pioneer A103/A104 DVD-R/DVD-RW. If you represent it as what it is factually and not as a miss representation and represent to the consumer that Zettabyte may indeed warenty the machine in the advent that a failure or such would occur... and that the Apple Warenty could be null and void, it should be ok to sell them provided all the aformentined details were disclosed. Furthermore what is considered a user upgradable part and such seems to change with respect to time, and I would consider the presence of a drive that Apple dosen't fundamentaly make as a unit that is in a system seprated from that of manfacture from what constituits the Apple computer aspect of the machine. Given these basi it would seem this is a grey area given general practice with upgrades toward computer hardware, regardless of Apple brand names, and fits with in established business practice.
Steve Jobs had an incredible blind spot about internal, built-in hard drives. I don't know just what the deal was. Apple NEVER offered one for the Apple ][ AFAIK. And even in the late eighties, he tried to sell the NeXT cube with a magneto-optical removable as its only mass storage device... In the 1995 time frame, when internal hard drives were common in PC's, Apple had NO internal hard drives for the Mac (and no decent external drives).
GCC in Cambridge started cobbling together Macs with (big!) internal 10 megabyte drives. I don't remember whether they had any legal issues with Apple; IIRC there were minor skirmishes but Apple permitted them to do it with appropriate disclaimers.
I won't go so far as to say the HyperDrive saved the Mac, but certainly it helped. An awful lot of people who needed to do serious work on Macs (using that hot new program, PageMaker, for example) needed a hard drive and used the HyperDrive, and it was a very good proof of concept in showing everyone what the Mac was like with a decent hard drive instead of a 400K floppy.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The Quadra 700 Macintosh that I got in 1991 had a 500MB hard drive. Unless you meant 1985, not 1995? Then again, in 1985 you could get a Mac XL with a 10MB hard drive.
Gabriel Ricard
Actually, iDVD is shipped with every new Mac, SuperDrive or not. I know this because it came with my PowerMac which I ordered without a SuperDrive (there was also an Apple page somewhere stating as much - I made sure to check this before ordering). I added one later, for cheaper than it would have cost me to get it preinstalled from Apple. The difference here is that the optical drive is user-serviceable in the tower but not in the eMac. I didn't void my warranty, but I'll bet these eMac mods do.
Say hello to zMac.
The Zettabyte Foundation, a New Hampshire Non-Profit Technology Research organization is just fine.
You wouldn't report "McDonald's goes Bankrupt" when "McDonald's Foreign Auto Body of Kenosha" folds, right?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I currently have five Intels (1 Win2K, 1 Win98, three Linux boxes). My kids are really pushing to get a Mac for Christmas. I like tinkering with new software, but I really dislike companies that think I'm A) Made of money B) Stupid This is true if you are talking computers, cars, bicycles or anything else I like/have to spend money on. An eMac with a SuperDrive would be perfect. But I can't get one. I have no use for the iMac concept of a nice LCD display permanently attached to a system unit that will be obsolete in two years. If I am directly or indirectly paying for an LCD display, I'm going to use it to watch DVD's and I'm going to keep it for a while. This means the minimum cost of entry for an iMac would be $1600. With a SuperDrive to burn, $1800. Using Apple's pricing structure, I should be able to get a SuperDrive on an eMac for +$200. The 'iMac premium' over an eMac is $3-400 depending on the models. I'd rather have a SuperDrive than a cutesey bubble base and an LCD that I cannot attach to anything else. And save $200 in the process. So it looks like maybe I'll just avoid the brain damage, get a Wintel with a nice SEPERATE LCD display and a firewire DVD burner, and spend a couple hundred less in the process.