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iBox Episode 2
coolgeek writes "According to this article on Wired, the iBox (original SlashDot post), later renamed to the CoreBox, has run into some trouble. Their strategy is to clone Mac computers using spare parts from repair centers. Evidently, the supplier of the repair parts was reminded by Apple Computer's Legal Department that supplying to a computer manufacturer was a breach of contract. Consequently, the supplier has chosen to stop supplying parts. More information on at the CoreComputing website, and they say the game isn't over yet..."
IIRC, repair parts are only supposed to be available to Apple Authorized Service Centers. At any rate, they (things like logic boards, at least) are very expensive to buy-- the service center gets a credit when they return the bad parts they replace. I believe that pricing structure is in place solely to make it prohibitively expensive to roll your own Mac with purchased service parts.
And Apple is far from the only company that does something like that. You think service parts purchased legitimately from a Chevrolet dealer will let you assemble your own Corvette for less than the normal price of a factory-built one? Hell, no!
~Philly
The aren't broken parts. They are original OEM parts that were intended to be used to replace broken parts on computers brought in for repair.
Last I checked, a Sawtooth (G4-AGP) motherboard was $800 (w/o CPU), and the customer was not allow to buy it for self install. Only the certified repair shop was allowed to perform the install. I was looking because I have an older Sawtooth that doesn't support dual processors.
So the cost of the replacement motherboard and a Sonnet Duet card far exceeded the purchase price of a new Mac when offset with selling the old one on eBay.
I don't care about what's on their contract, I could sign a contract with you that would allow you to publicly torture me to death but it doesn't mean it's right morally or legally to torture someone.
Are you 5 years old? First off, your comparison is flawed because torture is illegal you can't make a contract based on it. Apple has a contract with a provider to supply spare parts. They expect the bad ones back. The contract is not to resell and deplete Apple's parts stock. If the provider is in breach of contract they are liable. There is nothing illegal or immoral here.
Every hardware company does the same thing. If an IBM/Sun/HP/etc. computer went down they want the defective parts back. Apple wants it's parts back, it doesn't want someone reselling them as a new gear.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Just for the record, PowerComputing and UMAX boxes were not better. Huge quality issues. Over the 3 years we had them 2 out of every 3 of our 80 or so PowerComputing boxes had its ethernet die, as well as quite an assortment of video issues, and fan,hard drives, and disk drives die. Compared to Apples that we expect to be stable for 5 years, the clones were not such a good investment.
Mod point free since 2001
Ergo, an 800MHz PPC-Mac-OSX runs similar to a 1.6 GHz Pentium-WindowsXP machine.
This, of course, is a very rough rule of thumb based on general user experience. Efficiencies in the OSs and other parts of the architectures and configurations make a big deal here. This is not a reflection of comparitative FLOPS or any CPU benchmark.
These guys have G3 logic boards starting at $199 and G4 logic boards starting at $249, both sans CPU. One could roll his own PPC box at a reasonable price.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I'm not gonna get into the debate over what Apple should or shouldn't be doing, but I've seen some in this thread wondering how it works, these contracts with service providers (AASPs, Specialists, and Self-servicing Providers).
/. crowd interested. :-)
In a nutshell, here's how it works:
There are two ways you can order parts from Apple, essentially:
1. You can "service stock" the part. With this method, you buy it at the highest price. Apple doesn't expect anything back, since it's an order for something you want to stock, generally. It has other uses, but this is the main use.
2. You can order an "exchange part", where you send back the defective or failed part upon completion of the repair. Using this method, the part's cost to you is cheaper, and thus cheaper to your customers (ideally). Exchange orders are typically the most popular types of orders.
When I say cheaper via the exchange method, I mean it. Contractually, I can't disclose the difference(s)--it's essentially NDA information--but it's enough to warrant ordering exchange parts when you can.
However, if you don't return the failed or defective part within a certain time window, you get invoiced for the full price of the part you ordered. This acts as a pretty decent fraud deterrent, since if you wanted to pay full price, knowing about the return date ahead of time, you would have stocked the part to begin with. (And you wouldn't have taken a hit on your service provider rating because you failed to return something to Apple.)
Service providers are NOT allowed to buy most parts from Apple and resell them directly to others; non-CIPs (so-called "customer-installable parts", such as RAM and rechargeable batteries) must be installed by a service provider or returned to Apple.
Just some info for the
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
only when a monopoly acts illegally by using its existing monopoly to attempt to gain another monopoly in an unrelated market that there is a problem.
But this isn't accurate, either. You're right that monopolies are legal in the U.S. -- natural monopolies, that is. But any time a company tries to acquire a monopoly or maintain a natural monopoly using unreasonable methods, the company is in trouble with the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act. Thus, even if a company attained a natural monopoly legally and didn't try to enter new markets (and attempt to leverage its existing monopoly to attain one in the new market, like you suggest), they will still be liable under Sherman/Clayton if they do things like erect artificial barriers to entry or kill or suppress in various ways new entrants to their market.
IBM didn't "allow" jack shit... they just couldn't legally prevent the PC from being cloned.
IBM was essentially done in by their own greed. They threw together a computer with all off-the-shelf parts in a single year, solely because they wanted a piece of the consumer market that was then essentially owned by the Apple II.
The only proprietary thing in the original PC was the BIOS. Once the BIOS was reverse engineered, that was it for IBM. In 1987, they tried to wrest control of the hardware market back from the cloners with the Micro Channel Architecture in the first PS/2 systems-- it was about as successful as trying to remove the pee from a swimming pool.
Read more about it.
~Philly
Puhleeeze. Go and get a clue
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
I would agree, based on my expierence encoding mp3s, running multiple apps, etc. Still, 1.6mhz Intels don't run the $279 that the 800mhz Motorola CPU cost.
Nope, unfortunately you are wrong. The replacement parts are manufactured during the production run. Only under extraordinary circumstances would a part as complex as a motherboard be put into another production run, and then only at incredible cost. Based on the failure rate over the production run a percentage of replacement parts are manufactured and that's it.
If a large portion of these parts are consumed for non-failure situations, Apple will have to incur the cost of reestablishing production, or replacing the entire product with a suitable replacement (new hardware.)
As an owner of Apple hardware, I support their enforcement of contractual obligations to ensure that my purchases can be serviced and maintained for as long as is reasonable.
Wouldn't you be pissed off if your cars motor failed and you were told that no replacements were available because all the spares were bought up by people using them in other vehicles?
You feel that Apple should incur the sizable costs to do another production run of parts to support someone who is misappropriating their hardware for their own profit!
The stupid thing is you can get the Apple versions of this 'older' hardware on eBay for around the same price if not cheaper! This whole idea is lame.
They heavily modified the kernel (which is Mach, not FreeBSD), merged it with a heavily modified FreeBSD subsystem, and developed a GUI lightyears ahead of what KDE, GNOME, or Windows has managed. And yet, I think OSX is still the cheapest real commercial OS (excluding Linux, because the Linux companies don't have to pay to actually write the OS). They're selling the best OS around (95% of which they wrote themselves for the cheapest price. I wouldn't call that gouging.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Yawn.
Return to Wolfenstein. Descent 3. Heretic 2. Hexxen 2. UT 2003. The whole Doom set. Probably everything from ID in fact, and lots more.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Yeah, right.
He could have purchased a Madsonline MicroAdapter and paid for overnight shipping for less. Or, he could have gotten a genuine Apple Power Adapter from any number of on-line places (MacZone, MacWarehouse, MacConnection, Club-Mac, CDW, etc.) for $79.99 or less and paid for overnight shipping for a lot less than $179. CDW charges $77.19 for it and Airborne next afternoon service costs $11.99, while next morning delivery would cost $26-29. If you live near a CompUSA, you can get it there too for $79.99.
He got ripped bad... or you're mixed up. The retail price for the Apple adapter is $79 and that's what most retailers would charge for it - charging $179 is absurd. But how is this Apple's doing? That place decided to add a $100 markup on top of the standard dealer markup. Plus, how is this situation different from most laptops? Everyone one of them needs a specific power adapter.
I've omitted some parts of the preceding post because they were true and I have no problem with them; others because they're so obviously wrong they don't require a response.
... then try to do something useful with it, and you find that the OS doesn't do it, and it's a $20 shareware application to get it to work(joysticks anyone?)
Their cases are also too small to put much more then another harddrive.
There's easily space for four extra hard drives and several PCI cards in a typical pro Mac box. In general, Macs have more expansion capability than PCs owing to integrated functionality (no need for a PCI card or a FireWire card etc.)
Or are you talking about iMacs? I can go buy a firewire hard disc and just plug it into my iMac and it...just works.
The overall quality of Apple computers isn't even up to snuff with the x86 world. Read some forums about dented and pain peeling of Powerbooks, noise issues of Powermacs, keys falling off cheeply made iBooks, and you get the picture. The myth of "Apple quality" is greater then their "mhz myth"
You'll find bad stories about every product from every major company. Apple consistently does well in large scale surveys of reliability and customer satisfaction (usually the top or near the top score across the board).
2) OSX is the greatest OS since sliced bread. This comes from the fast that it's a "UNIX-based" OS that's "for a consumer". Well, if you want to compare feature for feature of the OS, Windows XP beats it hand down.
This depends on whether you count features or look at the implementation and usability of features. XP does many, many things badly.
Simple example: Mac OS X clients can find and mount windows file servers faster than XP.
Joysticks are an interesting example of "useful". (Mine work but maybe that's just me.) I have a devil of a time with my Dell laptop requesting I reinstall my Microsoft mouse drivers over and over again (they're already installed, the mouse generally works, it's a Microsoft product, and Dell is as close to Microsoft's favorite vendor as possible).
Every PC I've owned is or was plagued by driver issues, no matter how infrequently their hardware is played with.
3) Apple is a "friendly" company. Apple will sue anyone and everything.
Have they sued you for defamation yet? I think Apple is pretty restrained in its lawsuits. Coming up with a rant like this in response for Apple pointing out that one of the companies it deals with is clearly violating the spirit and letter of a perfectly common and straightforward contract requirement is hardly justification for this. Apple hasn't sued them or anything.
You have a theme that remotely has circular buttons? Apply legal will be on you like flies on manure.
You think that the sudden interest in rounded glass-like buttons is purely coincidental? You think that PC manufacturers got thrilled by translucent plastics just coincidentally with the success of the iMac? Apple is no different from a company like Nike that spends a lot of money building up brand recognition for a new shoe design and then finds its own suppliers selling products they designed to their competition.
If Joe Bag O'Donuts can make Macs for 1/2 price using Apple parts, how much is Apple REALLY overcharging for their systems?
How much does it cost Joe Bag O'Donuts to make copies of Windows install CDs? The cost of assembling a Mac out of parts Apple designed is hardly the same as the total cost. It's not like Apple runs at huge profit margins (unlike Microsoft...). It's quite clear that Microsoft locks in customers to maintain unreasonable margins on its software; Apple is doing just enough to stay afloat.
4)Apple for years hasn't been able to offer workstation level proformance on systems, so they decide "consumers" don't need to do things like upgrade. And to make matters worse, they intentionally cripple their low end o
Ok, whoa. Microsoft got fined billions because they were illegally forcing companies to sell Microsoft software with their hardware. All Apple is doing is preventing you from selling hardware to run their OS. No one says that you -have- to run Apple software, so you -have- to buy Apple hardware. If you don't want to use Apple, don't. It's that simple. Microsoft, on the other hand, got slammed because they wouldn't let other companies who were legally allowed to sell the hardware use another OS or sell it without an OS. -That's- illegal. Why should Apple be forced to create a competitor for a product that is already heavily competed against? Last I checked, every Windows machine on the market was in direct competition to Apple already.
Why is this bad? Anyway, I'm just glad to be out of the perpetual upgrade cycle. :)
You're right that monopolies are legal in the U.S. -- natural monopolies, that is.
:-)
My understanding is that a "natural monopoly" is an industry where it "seems natural" that one company should have a monopoly, because for multiple companies to compete would be an inefficient and wasteful use of resources - for example, the telephone network. One company has a monopoly on the telephone lines in your area. For a second company to provide you phone service, they would have to run their own physical telephone wires (stringing them between poles, closing streets so they can dig up pavement and run cable underground, etc.). That would be stupid, so the government granted one company the right to a monopoly on phone lines, but the government carefully regulates that company, dictating what rates they can charge and imposing penalties if their customer service isn't up to par. Of course that's the theory; practice is a little different.
But any time a company tries to acquire a monopoly or maintain a natural monopoly using unreasonable methods,
Almost all companies try to gain market share. There's no line drawn in the sand between trying to get 20% and trying to get 100%. Trying to achieve monopoly status is not illegal. Trying to maintain existing monopoly status, by doing things like erecting artificial barriers to entry (which is perfectly legal for a company that has not achieved monopoly status) is illegal. And of course, leveraging one monopoly in an attempt to attain one in a new market is illegal.
But don't listen to me; I'm just a Slashdotter.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I do understand your position as a consumer. You clearly do not want a Mac. But I think it's equally clear that you misunderstand Apple's position in the marketplace. Clones will kill them, just as sure as I'm typing this.
(I wish I could save myself the time and trouble of formulating and typing out this argument every time it comes up. In fact last time I recall I just linked to my previous comment from another discussion - it had been modded up to 5 with comments like "that's the best explanation I've ever heard for that!" Alas, you get something less than that today because I can't find it and I'm too lazy to look further.)
It's like this. Apple has one single strength. They have one single reason for being. They have one asset that earns them a place in the market among all the PC makers selling comodity parts with a warantee on it. What is it? It's the fact that they are vertically integrated. They make the hardware, the OS and a few key apps.
This means they can make them all work together seamlessly in ways that Microsoft and Dell never can. They can provide a higher-quality, more unified experience to their customers. They can also turn the company on a freakin' dime when they decide to because they don't have to get 4 other companies to agree on the new direction. (USB anyone?)
Its also true that it is this very "asset" which keeps their prices higher than your average Micron or eMachines box. Clones would definetly mean lower prices through competition. But in the end Apple would lose thier reason for being. They would no longer be able to provide that user experience and they would no longer be able to be that innovative powerhouse that the rest of the industry sponges off of. They would become mediocre. They would end up being no different from any other company that makes software or hardware (not both). Eventually they would go under, having no way to distinguish themselves in the market.
Or something like that. Like I said, you don't have to buy one. It's not for everyone. But that is thier business, man. They can't go for the model of Microsoft or Dell. (And neither MS or Dell go for thiers!) But a healthy Apple (read: no clones) is good for everyone. Their innovations fuel the rest of the industry, whether you buy their products directly or not.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Actually, it is in place solely to keep Service Centers from taking broken parts, refurbing them, and putting them back into macs for sale. It is all part of the iron-fisted control that keeps up the reputation for reliability that has formed part of the Apple brand.
"I think we should tax people who stand in water! " - Mr. Gumby