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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..."
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.
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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.
Oh no!
Sincerely,
Apple Computer
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
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.
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.
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.
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)
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