Slashdot Mirror
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..."
I mean who whould have guessed Apple would have threatened to sue their supplier into oblivion?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I was under the impression that every Apple-authorized repair center had a similar contract with Apple, which is why I didn't put too much stock in the original story (I expected this to happen - similar things have been tried before). Where are they going to find reliable suppliers who are not authorized by Apple?
I remember that one of the CPU upgrade makers had a deal where they'd send you a new CPU and daughtercard, and give you a major discount if you sent in your old daughtercard (so they could swap CPUs and resell it, since they had no other way to obtain the daughtercards the CPUs were soldered to). I don't think that strategy would really work in this case.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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
I wonder if it's okay to supply parts to a (non-business) individual, for 'DIY home repair'? Could be a good way to put together an OS X box on the cheap.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
low-cost, configurable Mac clones based on older motherboards from Apple.
Dude, I wonder why when I booted up my Mac it said:
APPLE ][
]_
The coolest voice ever.
I could just see it, a few hours after the Apple store closes, the dumpster divers show up and root through the trash.
Thanks to their hard work, you can buy an iBox, no two the same. Today they are offering a special on an iMac hybrid that has a modern flat-screen stuck on the front of an old bulbous blue first-gen iMac that has an orange mouse.
Tomorrow, they expect to have a "PowerBox" PowerBook made from notebook guts obtained during a particularly successful dumpster-dive installed into the toilet-seat discarged by the plumbing place next door. The local wildlife was restless that night: this machine has a live mouse.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Begun, this Clone War has....
"He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." - Steve Jobs on Bill Gates
What is going on!!??
Yes, I guess it is. Every once in a while someone gets up and says "hey, Apple is the only one making Apple computers! HOW DARE THEY! It's my God-given right to make and sell anything I damn well want! Apple are a bunch of bastards!"
How dare Apple make a great OS, then put it on machines only they make. How dare they try to make a little cash and stay afloat. They should just give away their hardware and software for free!
Ok, a little drastic, so they should just licence their OS to anyone and forget about hardware? Well, they're in a great position now. If you want to use their OS, you have to buy their hardware. Simple enough and tons of people are doing it. No where near as many people as on Intel computers, but still a good chunk of people who enjoy using OSX.
Someone comes along and tries to get around this and of course, Apple tries to protect itself. But with Slashdot of course the main theme is "How DARE you try to protect yourself! You just sit there and take it!"
Maybe if Apple were to build in protection to their hardware that would blow itself up if someone tries to build it from scratch!
Hang on, gotta go call Sen. Hatch.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Oh no!
Sincerely,
Apple Computer
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
is it more acceptable for hardware manufacturer to fence off competitors? eg Apple restricting parts to be used on Apply-Only machines, while everyone's crying foul when MS is trying to install its own browser on its own product (and still allows competing browsers to be installed).
imagine what would happen if Ford only allows its "rolling" tyres to be fitted on its cars...
monopoly: Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service.
a monopoly of their own product? freaking duh. what do you expect? for them to throw their company out the window by allowing someone to intrude on their copyrights? okay, sure. they're monopolistic. whatever.
These are Apple spare parts. Apple has a limited stock of these to be used as replacements. They expect the part it replaces to be sent back so it can be reworked. There is not some magical motherboard fairy that creates an endless supply for someone to leech off and resell as new.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
It's very simple, really.
Apple sells hardware at a premium price. The profits go on to fund interesting software like the iLife apps, iCal, iSync, Safari, Quicktime, a full development suite, and even an accelerated X11 Server. These software are made available for free to Mac users, because they already paid for it. In fact, if you use many of these applications, you'll realize that the original hardware price tag isn't that much steeper when you consider software costs.
Now, allowing people to buy parts and build cheaper Apple clones messes this up somewhat. Who will pay for the free software? The alternative for Apple must then be either to charge for the software, or to charge so much for replacement parts that it's impossible to build a cheaper clone. Realize that both alternatives are bad for loyal customers who actually buy from Apple. Additionally, it keeps the resale value of Macs high, which is also good for the Apple customer.
Apple's involvement in open source is among the best, but it is very carefully limited to areas that Apple isn't competing in. For example, Apple doesn't feel that there is any competition in the OS kernel space, so Darwin is open source. Safari is a capable browser, but Apple is not planning to win any browser wars, so Apple's chose to participate in KHTML development. However, Apple is holding back core technologies so that nobody can build a OS X clone for x86, which would put Apple customers back in the same situation of paying for people who would rather not pay Apple.
You may disagree with their business plan, but all in all, Apple's strategy is internally coherent, and appears to still work.
Do you think Sony would allow a repair center to resell PS2 components to a third party, who would in turn sell something called a "Play Stashun?" Is anyone jumping down Sony's throat for not allowing cloning of PlayStations?
Perhaps we can consider that not every platform benefits from being cloned.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Apple produces spare parts to replace broken parts for machines it has manufactured. There's quite a high overhead of maintaining these relatively small quanties and their distribution is relatively complex, so it's fair to suggest that these parts aren't sold at much of a profit, if any. When Apple sells a computer, it expects to make back enough money to cover both the parts and the development of that machine. When Apple sells a part, chances are the cost charged to the end-user, if any, will reflect the shipping and manufacturing cost of that part, only.
The upshot is that if Apple were to sell its own parts to competitors, it would be subsidizing those competitors because the cost of selling those parts wouldn't cover the costs of developing them and marketing the overall product built from them, costs Apple still incurrs.
Now, as far as Microsoft goes - do we expect Microsoft to subsidize Linux? I mean, on a moral level. Slashdotters fume that Microsoft signs restrictive contracts that force people who buy PCs to, ultimately, pay for Microsoft's marketing and development costs regardless of whether we want to use Microsoft's design, but do we actually want some extreme opposite? Have you ever heard anyone complain that Microsoft should? If Microsoft objected to a port of Internet Explorer to WINE, do you believe Slashdotters would be up in arms about it?
The answer of course is no. Apple may be shooting themselves in the foot by not creating a mechanism that allows third parties to contribute to their costs in exchange for the ability to produce machines independently, but it's hardly immoral for them to do so. And it's certainly not immoral for them to tell their resellers that goods that are intended for the exclusive use of Mac buyers - people who've paid money to Apple and expect service at a reasonable cost - be only supplied to Mac buyers, on pain of Apple dropping them.
Microsoft's business tactics are well documented. Apple's are not in the same ballpark. And neither company should have any obligation to subsidize a competitor, except possibly as compensation for those cases where illegal actions by that company has damaged that competitor. I don't see any case where Apple has to compensate anyone.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The only flat panel iMac I see listed at store.apple.com that has a 60GB hard drive runs $1299. So that particular incident is all Micro Center. But all of this is really beside the point.
When you buy an Apple machine you're not buying the box, you're buying the overall product. Apple thinks of the computer as a whole, not processor, firmware, software. If you don't care about any of this and just want a cheap generic DIY box, then why are you interested in Macs at all? Just for the transparent windows?
Much of Mac OS X's value comes as result of Apple's approach to product design. The ease of use, peripheral connectivity that "just works", seamless integration and low maintenace don't come for free -- they come as a result of looking the computer as a whole product, not various disperate pieces slammed into a box ala Dell. You can't have both.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Because when you reverse engineer the BIOS and write your own, you're not using the original IBM parts anymore. THis person was using original Apple parts.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Steve Jobs shoots Apple in the foot once again. MBA classes all across America probably use Apple's poor business decisions as examples of how to offend customers and how *not* to grow business
Please enlighten us as to how allowing a third party to distribute a cheap knockoff of a design that Apple spent years creating will bolster Apple's image of quality and help them increase revenue.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
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
Obviously, letting anyone build the hardware and just licensing the operating system could never be very profitable... what a stupid idea :)
It's only really worked once, and many others have tried. I don't see that as a very strong business case.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
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)
Nobody will read this far down in the discussion but I just want to put this bit of truth out into the ether:
...eventually.
1. Apple isn't evil because of "going after" this parts supplier. The supplier is in obvious breech of contract. Duh. There's plenty to criticise in the Apple company and in the Mac platform; pick a reason, just make it a valid one, okay?
2. Clones are bad for the Macintosh platform. Bad, bad, bad. Any strategy which erodes their ability to leverage OS/iApps/Hardware into a seamless, second-to-none user experience will be death to the platform. It is not good. It is bad. It will kill the one, single unique thing about this company and they will be swallowed up into the sea of mediocrity that is the rest of the PC industry. Nobody should want that, as even PC users benefit from Apple's R&D.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Puhleeeze. Go and get a clue
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
I'll bite.
1) This argument is kinda silly at this point. Originally, it was brought up to point out that just because a company has small market share, it doesn't mean the company is succesful. In essence, the initial logical argument has been distorted by opponents and proponents to the point where it doesn't make sense. And you're completely wrong about the PowerMac case. Two optical drives, 4 hard drives, built-in Firewire, bluetooth, USB, modem, ethernet, WiFi plus 4 PCI slots and an AGP card with dual monitor support. What do you want to put in your computer?
2) Hmmm, I don't think sliced bread is an operating system, but here goes. OS X is an excellent OS. It's not the be-all end-all, and it has advantages & disadvantages compared to PCs or Linux. Let's point out a couple things. iBooks start at $1000, eMacs sell for less. Quicktime nag screens suck, no doubt there. Then again, Quicktime Pro is one of the best software values on any platform, it's easy, it's powerful and it works. Macs suck for games (so I here), crush Linux for ease of use, are far easier than PCs to network (I've spent 10x more time getting my Mom's Windows network to work than it I've collectively spent on mine), and have a much higher proportion of good software than either Linux or Windows. Ya, the hardware costs more upfront. But the OS is rock-solid, easy to use, and quite powerful.
3) Apple's friendly? Well, they have a nice image, no doubt. But really, I've never heard any defend Apple by calling them friendly.
4) Where's the myth?
5) Not really a myth. Some stuff doesn't work. Every digital camera, flash card reader, mouse, trackball, tablet, monitor and drive I've plugged in has just worked. I had to install the driver for my printer, and for the USB-serial adapter I needed for some legacy devices that I used on my PowerMac 7200 in 1999 & earlier. Webcam support supposedly sucks, and well-intentioned webmasters who think they are clever (effectively) go out of their way to break non-WinExplorer browsers. Other than that, I rarely have problems. In fact, at one point I had my well-upgraded (new hard drive, upgraded RAM, WiFi card, Zip Drive) Lombard Powerbook G3, circa 1998, running for 5 weeks straight. Not a world's record, but pretty good.
Your last point is your best. Why do we support Apple? Well, because they make very good products that work, and a certain segment of the population thinks it's the best value out there. We're all different, and make judgements based on other criteria. No one's right, no one's wrong, we're all free to do as we wish.
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
I own a Mac, and I do buy into the quality argument; I'm also a QA person (I hate to use the term engineer in the software industry), so I believe I have a worthwhile perspective on quality.
The components in a Mac may be the same stuff other PCs are made of, and therefore the quality isn't in those components: but it is in their integration that quality is visible, and in their use.
Let me explain, from my quality background:
A high quality software product is not one with zero bugs or defects. Zero bugs or defects is a low *error* product.
A high quality software product is one that the user enjoys using, or in situations where pleasure isn't a good indicator, the user can do their task effectively, efficiently, and with a minimum of hassle, problems, mistakes, and errors.
So to rephrase those in terms of a Mac, a piece of hardware:
A Mac is not high quality because it has no errors or defects.
A Mac is high quality because the user gets pleasure from it's use, or alternatively they can do the tasks they want, with a Mac, with a minimum of hassle, problems, errors, and setbacks.
So to bring it closer to home, I use a Mac, and I see it as high quality, and I agree with the BMW statement on multiple levels:
Small niche
Affluent niche
Image conscious niche
Quality conscious niche
I enjoy using my Mac. Already one of my metrics for quality is satisfied.
My PowerBook *feels* good to hold. My PowerMac *sounds* good, because it is so quiet. The case on the PowerMac is a pleasure to open, because it is so simple. I like opening it to just look at everything and how well laid out it is, because I like machines and technology. I put together PCs for 8 years, and after owning a PowerMac for 8 months, I wonder *why* no PC case is designed like this.
Hard drives are mounted on the floor on trays, instead of a freestanding cage in the middle of the case. This cuts down on vibration by directing it into the floor, and minimizes cable clutter because all the IDE connectors are at the edge of the motherboard, parallel to the connector on the hard drive. This also increases airflow because the cables and drives run left to right, instead of front to back on every PC case I've seen; so by design the drives are positioned to reduce vibration and increase circulation.
The case is covered in a thick swathe of plastic, and there's a plastic motherboard tray (probably all acrylic), both of which reduce vibration noise a lot. This *also* doubles as an aesthetic device, making the PowerMac more attractive than most PC cases, as well as providing handles to make the PowerMac easier to handle than most PC cases.
The main cooling fan is 120mm, for low RPM and high cooling efficiency.
So as a technofetishist, I enjoy the design of my PowerMac and PowerBook. Elegant and efficient. Pleasure. All metrics for quality, in my book.
So then there's the other bit, about getting the job done; the Mac platform is the most efficient and effective platform right now for me to do what I want to do. Having access to a terminal suits me perfectly fine, because I can work from it. It beats Windows in some areas, and matches Linux. Then there's the applications, which beats Linux in most areas, and Windows in just about all areas. This is purely subjective because people have different needs.
I don't play games.
I make DVD-Rs using iMovie and iDVD, and I haven't seen anything on the Linux or Windows side that matches this combo in ease of use, elegance, and simplicity. 1 day to make a 1 hour iMovie, and 1 day to design the accompanying DVD, and that's because I'm a picky perfectionist bugger. If I wanted to slap something together, it would be 2 hour for the movie (the time it takes to import, plus minor titling and transitions), and 1 hour for the DVD (using stock layouts). These are professionaly looking layouts too, things I am *happy* to use, overjoyed, because when I use them, the people I will be giving thes
GPL Deconstructed
Yes, BUT they bought them for a different reason....
If they bought them as replacement parts (for which they have an agreement with Apple) and then sold them as new machines, they would be trading under false pretenses and in violation of their agreement with Apple. Apple can therefore do exactly what they have done.
We can debate the "niceness" of the agreement, or of Apple and we can debate the naievity (or stupidity...) of the company but they have broken an agreement with Apple and that's all there is to it.
It's like obtaining software "for non-commercial use" at a reduced cost and then using it for commercial reasons, or buying something in place X and taking it to place Y when you signed an agreement not to... you are breaking that agreement whether you like it or not.
hohum
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net