Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 16th Jun 2009 13:25 UTC
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Member since:
2006-04-22
The same thing goes for their servers. They have used standard IDE and SATA drives, yet to add a new drive you must purchase an extremely overpriced drive directly from Apple. Why, because you need the cheap $2 plastic drive cage. Through a brokers network I had contact with several resellers who told me they were in the same boat, and had tried in vane to find these silly little cheap Apple drive cages. It became apparent that Apple did everything in their power to see that the drive cages would not enter the parts market. And of course any standard drive would void the warranty.
At the same time with an HP server, I purchased HP drive cages (that actually are not just cheap plastic frames) and was able to use them with OEM drives from various MFRs. The availability of after market parts does play a very significant role for servers. HP understood this, and have gone so far as to help an entire industry that deals specifically with just the parts, not the desktops, servers, etc.. Point is, I know that even with a 10 year old Proliant, I can have a power supply replaced quickly. Same can not be said for Apple.
But this is no different than their own reseller strategies. Wonder why there are so few Apple resellers? Because the limitations, restrictions, and requirements are such to turn away (turn off) most resellers. Besides the Apple store, you have here Microcenter, a large enough storefront that they could either put up with the rules, or have them rewritten. On the other hand, just about any guy on the street can become a Dell reseller, and as for HP after a quick approval process meeting very limited criteria, you are good to go. As a side note, one client back in 2007 was in the business of leasing Apple hardware, and simply let that business end when the contract was up due to their complete disgust at Apple's treatment, again limitations, requirements, and restrictions by Apple that this same company never faced with Sun, Cisco, HP, and IBM.
So the point is, beyond the merits of what OSX is or is not, Apple's policies from supporting resellers to parts suppliers, to leasing agents is in many ways no different than their policies regarding the application development. The net effect is businesses like ours say NO to Apple, to which it runs downstream to clients, partners, and individuals who all equally say NO! But you know what I have learned over the years? Apple just does not give a shit, for they know that if YOU decide not to develop, someone else will eventually come. May take a while, may not be as equally good, but in the end they will have maintained their policies at the cost of developers, resellers, partners, and users.