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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
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
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.
Puhleeeze. Go and get a clue
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
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.
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