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Terra Soft Withdraws Plans for PowerPC Motherboards
DamienMcKenna writes "Terra Soft has just announced it is not going to produce PPC motherboards: 'We regret having launched a product initiative and built expectations prior to receiving first shipment. We have clearly learned a powerful lesson and do extend our apology to you, our existing and potential customers. As the Teron mainboard and associated systems will be made available through other resellers, we will encourage them to sign-on as official Yellow Dog Linux resellers in order that we may continue to support movement of what we hope to be a very popular product.' This leaves Genesi as the only company who still has PowerPC motherboards for sale, with a new board design due later this year."
...but not entirely unexpected either. There's no way Apple would allow it, because God forbid they'd actually have to do something competitive.
It's true that the clones nearly killed Apple. But this wasn't because of some problem inherent in cloning, it was because Apple refused to compete with the cloners. Their whole plan, initially, was to continue their absurdly high margins by selling high-end machines and having the cloners produce low-end machines; they'd be in different markets and Apple would still basically have a monopoly in their own little AppleWorld.
This is the major problem with Apple, I think. And I doubt we'll see any increase in their marketshare, no matter how deserved it may be, until they get off their freaking high horse and start actually trying to compete in the open market.
I'm equally baffled.
If you simply must have a G3 machine, for whatever reason, why not get an entire second hand Mac for the same sort of price that these people were trying to charge for just a mobo?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
This is the major problem with Apple, I think.
You raise some good points but I think there's an important piece of this equation that you're missing. The lack of clones is the major problem with Apple? Sure, it keeps prices high and marketshare low. It's true. It is the worst thing about the platform.
And yet, it is also the one single thing that makes them unique in the market and gives them value. The vertical integration they have (hardware/os/iapps) allows them to a) innovate their product line faster and more radically than some other hardware/software makers and b) allows them to sell an entire end-to-end solution (like firewire-imovie-idvd-superdrive) with a user experience better than anyone elses. These things are at the core of what makes Apple Apple. Take them away - take away the vertical integration by doing clones - and what you get is cheaper boxes and much rejoicing...and a dead/dying platform within 2 years because it has lost that which made it valuable to begin with.
Bonus point: Why should anyone care? Certainly Mac users should care, but others should, too. Apple has an influence on the personal computer industry that is vastly disproportionate to its marketshare. They innovate. Others follow. Therefore, a healthy Apple is good for the industry. Mac clones = bad for Apple = bad for the pc industry.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Come on now mods, interesting? This guy is ignorant at best, and a blatant troll at worst.
It makes one wonder if the legendary Apple legal department made some kind of threat or crackdown on their effort.
How in any way could Apple make a legal threat against a company attempting to produce a generic PPC computer to run Linux that would NOT be able to boot into Mac OS or OS X? Just because Apple is the most prominent user of the PPC arch doesn't mean that they control the market.
As for Apple actually caring about what TerraSoft is doing, that's about as equally preposterous as your first point. Very few people buy Apple hardware solely to run Linux. Of those few that do, the vast majority are laptop users. So in the end you have a minority of Apple hardware using Linux users (which are already a minority to begin with) that TerraSoft would legitimately be competing with Apple for. Do you honestly think Apple is going to lose any sleep over that? I think not.
Most likely, there were unexpected delays and/or the mobos just simply weren't a quality product. In that case, I would expect TerraSoft to be as vague as possible. No company wants to go out and advertise the fact that they couldn't deliver like they had earlier said; it's embarassing.
IBM is the hardware monster. Think MCA. Price some RAM from some of the old PS/2 machines.
They truly are like a Shaido with one goat.