Apple Acquires Zayante 26
pinqkandi writes "Apple purchased Zayante, a big name in the FireWire/i.Link/IEEE 1394 community. Apple hopes to increase its FireWire presence with this purchase, or, in their own words, 'By acquiring Zayante, Apple is extending its commitment to FireWire as the premiere, high-speed digital interface solution.' Interestingly enough, Zayante works a great deal with Windows FireWire integration ... Windows-compatible iPod anyone?"
Gigawire? (Score:1)
I really have no idea, I'm not suggesting anything...
old news (Score:2, Insightful)
btw: this has been up on Apple's news page for quite some time. The article [apple.com] is dated 12 days ago.
Re:old news (Score:1)
the auto sysnc features with itunes will not work without an Apple (duh, itunes mac only). it still is a cool device with other platforms, but still more features on a mac. because of the drive formatting, i don't think it can be used as a boot drive on anything but a Mac either.
Re:old news (Score:1)
Not exactly. Xplay is basically three things. It allows you to access your iPod as a removable hard drive (via the "MacDrive" software which Xplay includes) so you can copy any sort of files onto or off of it. It also includes an Explorer plugin which allows you to browse your MP3s as they are catalogged in iPod-land (by playlist, song title, artist or album) and to drag and drop new MP3s into the Songs "folder" to add them to the iPod; I believe you can also create and update your playlists this way. Finally, it adds support for the iPod as a removable device to the Windows Media Player, so you can use its woeful features to manage your music. In the latest release there is also support for updating the iPod's firmware and recovering the iPod music database (it doesn't simply store things in a simple directory structure), which is often necessary because of the frequent FireWire bus lockups and write-behind errors you'll get with Xplay and Windows (these are apparently mostly Windows' fault and not Xplay's).
iTunes blows away Media Player in terms of usability, but if you have your MP3s stored on a Windows box like me and just want to get them onto your iPod, Xplay is the best software available right now.
Oldness (Score:1, Informative)
Just a friendly tip from your local ReTaRd.
Re:Oldness (Score:1)
I'm guessing that it didn't really seem interesting to whoever was moderating submissions that day.
Can't blame them though.
oh god i hope not (Score:1)
I see the ipod as apples way of saying thanks to the mac faithful, by giving us the coolest gadget of the year.
Terrible move (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Terrible move (Score:1)
BTW, many of the current Firewire IC houses got their start by licensing the designs that our team did while we were at Apple the first time. TI, Philips, Fujifilm, LSI Logic, Sony and Adaptec all started by licensing the Firewire designs that were developed at Apple from 1990-95. Only IBM, Fujitsu and AT&T/Lucent/Agere did independent designs back then.
Oxford, BTW, is an excellent little company, and the whole FW community thinks very well of them.
Eeeew (Score:1, Flamebait)
Long live USB 2.0, the open standard.
Re:Eeeew (Score:2)
Re:Eeeew (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Eeeew (Score:2)
Re:Eeeew (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow, when you look at it like that, the enormity of your stupidity comes right to the fore.
Go reboot your commodity piece of shit.
Re:Eeeew (Score:2)
Should I reboot my Alpha?
Should I reboot my three VA Linux rack mounts?
Should I reboot my 180 Macs of various flavors?
Should I reboot my 3 1.4 ghz+ athlons?
Apple had an "unfavorable" license agreement on the patents in their portfolio in reference to IEEE 1394. Apple does not own all the patents for IEEE 1394. Sony owns some of them and call the standard "i.Link". Apple owns the name "Firewire" but "1394 LA" owns the IEEE 1394 standard. 1394 LA charges
So, Apple is seeking to own through production something that they only half own through intellectual property terms.
There are a few companies that seek to monopolize their markets. Microsoft monopolizes software on commodity hardware. Intel had an x86 monopoly prior to AMD's introduction of the Athlon. Rambus attempted to monopolize all current generation memory types for all hardware. Apple seeks to monopolize desktop publishing/graphic art, amateur DV editing and hopes to regain their monopoly in K-12 education.
As long as I have an IT budget and some morality, I will vote with my dollars against immoral business practices. I inherited 180 macs that are absolute pieces of shit compared to what was available from "commodity" hardware vendors from the same time period, especially for the price that was paid for them. I cherish the few clones in my mac inventory for their quality and upgrade ability. It is a mac myth that Apple stopped licensing their hardware to outside vendors on the basis of clones ruining Apple's image of quality. The clones had superior quality to what apple was offering at the time. In most cases, clones offered identical performance for half the price and much better upgrade ability. Apple likes their customers to be forced to buy a whole new machine instead of just upgrading the parts that are deficient.
As it stands, Apple has not advanced the internals of their hardware in two years. The Gamecube, with a 485mhz G3 that implements a partial altivec instruction set, retails for $199. The 500mhz G3 iMac retails for $800. A game console has cought up with a mac for performance.
ATA 66? 100mhz fsb? 1000mhz from a processor that performs clock for clock the same as a Pentium III? SDRAM?
Those of you that love your macs, love them for their gloss, not their performance or price. Those of you that are Mac zealots, have been steamrolled by the Apple marketing machine.
Example:
Let's pit 3 dual processor 1533mhz athlon XPs against 1 800mhz G4. Price point is $1600
In one corner, you have a single bottom end apple G4 tower at 800 mhz.
800MHz PowerPC G4
256K L2
cache
256MB SDRAM memory
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW drive
ATI Radeon 7500
56K internal modem
In the other corner we have 3u of Dual processor athlon goodness.
3 tyan tiger AMD 760mp chipset motherboards @ $504.
6 1800XP Athlons @ $303 (yes, they work).
3 256mb PC2100 registered ecc DDR ram @ $195.
3 1u cases w/300w power supplies @ $120.
3 40gb hard drives @ $159.
Price point is $1281.
Now rewrite your code.
Which takes 3 weeks, by which time Apple raises the price of the G4 another hundred dollars while the price of the cluster drops a hundred dollars.
(please note that in a previous version of this post I made that prediction, when in fact the price has dropped by over $300.)
Ok, that was a flame, let's stick to matters at hand.(Turned out to be not enough of a flame)
Referencing the altivec article, the ars technica article and the c't article (you know which one I'm talking about, that place where you dare not look, you'll find x86 there staring back at you) we can draw these assumptions:
The G4 with Altivec performs equally clock for clock with x86 w/SSE with some rare exceptions where it performs 100% faster clock for clock.
best case scenario for our similar priced systems using the best case for the G4 benchmark, rc5:
Single G4 800mhz 8,243,188 keys per second
6 AMD 1800XP 32,987,538 keys per second
300 dollars less expensive, x86 is 4 times as productive.
Seti@home using Ars Lambchop benching wu: Identical!
3.35 per work unit.
x86 is 6 times as productive for 300 dollars less.
CINT2000: base 648 - XP1800
CINT2000: base 242 - G4 800mhz
684 vs 242... and that is a single processor comparison!
If we can optimize to scale, x86 is 16 times as fast for 300 dollars less.
If you know of any benchmarks where Mac can compare favorably for the price, please let us all know. You are right, Mhz is not everything. But you have to get some numbers to back the claim that the G4 is even marginally close in performance to machines with well over twice the clock speed. I'm sure that will convince us all to run out and buy Macs for number crunching
This is where your love of Apple has led the company. You buy blindly so they sell overpriced shit and call it gold.
Debating Mac zealots is so easy because a Mac zealot's mind is weak enough to believe the Apple marketing lies.
Re:Eeeew (Score:1)
2) 1394 *is* the open standard. It was developed using IEEE rules (fully open meetings, just show up, no NDAs, no invitations required, patents must be disclosed). USB was an invitation-only thing. Apple tried to get involved with the USB 1.0 effort back in 1995 but was rebuffed ("first publicly drop ADB and Firewire and then we'll let you join the club"). I was the technical lead on Firewire at Apple from 1990 - 96, and was a founder of Zayante. There is no attempt at a monopoly, just an attempt to do a superior job.