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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?"
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
Here's a link to the MacCentral Story from Yahoo.
blarg.
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
they were calling it an emac, but were not apple..
thats why apple went after them
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
Hmmm, personal attacks against me instead of addressing the points I make in my post? I suggest you look again at my original post when compared with the post I'm answering now (hey, that's your post.) Please apply your maturity gage to your own post and act according to your own advice.
I find it most interesting that you're ready to make personal attacks against others while hiding behind the AC skirt, especially considering that your main point against my original post is "people like you...just don't add anything here and worsen the signal to noise ratio." Me thinks your kettle is seriously black; in other words, you're a hypocrite or at least you're acting hypocritically today.
Cheers,
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
It is an eMac, originally purchased from Apple... what's wrong with calling it one? If they were calling their white box PC clone an eMac, I could see the problem, but there's nothing wrong with calling an eMac and eMac.
it is a modified emac, if i ordered the part listed on the box, i would not get one with a superdrive.
your right it is an emac, made by apple, however the product as sold is not an apple model, and should not be called one.
calling the product an emac causes confusion because consumers will go into stores and ask for the superdrive emac, which does not exist.
apple sold an emac to zettybyte. zettybyte changed it from its original form, and design options, and therefore shouldnt use apple marketing names for their product.
it would be perfectly ok to tell people its a modified emac with a super drive (that is what it is) it just should nto be marketed as an apple emac, which it was
Yes. And ?
This is pretty simple. Apple is the lesser of two evils right now. Rest assured that when Apple turns to the dark side the tide will turn.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
People buy computers, make upgrades, and resell them all the time and nobody complains. Usually they resell it months or years after they buy it, whereas I assume Zettabyte tries to sell their computers as quickly as possible, but I don't see what the difference is legally.
The same situation happens with cars, and I haven't heard any complaints there either... you can buy a Honda Civic, put in a fancy CD player and hang fuzzy dice on the rear view mirror, then put an ad in the paper saying that you're selling a Honda Civic, and I doubt Honda is gonna complain that you can't call it a Civic anymore because it has a Blaupunkt stereo in it. (And I also doubt other people are gonna go to a Honda dealership and ask why none of the Civics there have fuzzy dice :)
it would be perfectly ok to tell people its a modified emac with a super drive (that is what it is) it just should nto be marketed as an apple emac, which it was
It was marketed as a Apple eMac modified to include a SuperDrive... I still don't see any problem.
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!
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)
In your example, you're not an "authorized Honda reseller", so there are fewer guarantees to the buyer. In fact, I believe you would be required to sell the Civic as "used" because you, as a consumer, did get the "right of first sale."
-J
That's not the impression I got... from what I remember, Zettabyte was going to provide the warranty and service on their modified machines. I just tried going to their website to see what they say, but their home page seems to have been replaced by a 9 megabyte MPEG!? (FWIW, I have no idea what the MPEG is of, but it looks interesting :)
Anyways, some guy in the previous discussion did say that Zettabyte was providing their own warranty.
Until then I'll pay for Apple's GUI and APIs and use them on a Free Software foundation (Darwin).
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
zettybtye may be warrantying the machines, but if they include original documentation, then it points th econsumer back to apple, and thus causes confusion.
the point about the honda civic expresses my idea, better then i did. once it is modified, and resold, the original warranty is no longer applicable.
Anyways, it's weird that their web site is completely gone... it'd be nice to have some facts about what happened instead of all of our speculation :)