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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."
...is why this would have been a Good Thing in the first place. I'm genuinely curious about this, but why would anyone shell out cash for a PPC mobo that only supported G3s? It's a good chip, yeah, but for similar cash you could get a much better x86 solution and run some variety of Linux on it, no?
Obviously there must be some advantages to a PPC board running YDL as compared to an x86 board running a comparable Linux distro that I don't understand, but I can't imagine what sort of market would pay for a board that would run such an aging processor.
Why is this in the Apple category? What does Linux running on a non-Apple PPC motherboard have to do with Apple?
Its interesting that the given reasons for dropping the PPC motherboard production by TerraSoft were so vague. It makes one wonder if the legendary Apple legal department made some kind of threat or crackdown on their effort. Notice also that TerraSoft puts the focus on encouraging other PPC motherboard buyers to become dealers of their Yellow Dog Linux OS; perhaps Apple wanted to keep TerraSoft tied to using their own hardware for TS' computer systems, fearing that a TerraSoft which was both hardware and OS independant would create a viable rival in the 'alternative' PC platform arena, where Apple resides essentially unchallenged. I'd love to get the full scoop on this ... anyone working @ TerraSoft care to make an AC post about this ?
The Dual G4 Linux card:
Found here
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
See, it's not Apple - it's PowerPC damn it!. Apple is not PowerPC and PowerPC is not Apple.
BTW who needs Apple clones so the Apple world becomes in just a parallel x86 world? I don't really see the need. Apple is based on control: control comes at a price, but provides guarantees to those willing to pay for it. You buy an Apple and you know the quality of the what you're getting (overall, hardware and software)- even if you're not an enthusiast.
What I did expect is an Apple story with the penguin icon. The other day it was the B.Gates icon (that post on Virtual PC).
God knows what's next.
The problem was that it worked out a little too well for the consumers.
this may be... but if it didn't work out well for any of the companies involved, then cancelling the program was quite the no-brainer. i owned a UMAX clone that I was moderately happy with; cheap macs can't be a bad thing for me... but i'd rather have expensive macs than no Apple.
people forget that Apple was footing almost the entire cost of the license, and leaving the cloners to collect all the profits. this situation was one of the leading factors in Apple nearly disappearing in the mid-90's. Apple was paying the R&D on the boards, then just handing the things to Motorola, UMAX, and PowerComputing. Every clone was, essentially, just a cheaper version of what Apple was already offering.
So, in the end, Apple was paying all the R&D cost to set up another company to make all the profits selling almost the exact same box.
And people doubt the decision Apple made in the long run? If that sounds like a good deal to you, I have a business proposition for you.
woof!