Hi there Tim. I'm not sure I entirely follow you on the marketing
issue of these cards or ports. Are you saying that Apple wants to
fracture the PCMCIA standard in general because they're able to make
the Airport cards far cheaper than the typical IEEE 802.11 vendor, and
so people would overwhelmingly purchase Apple's cards for general
wireless purposes rather than from the typical vendor?
I guess I didn't quite get the meaning of "gray market" :) Is that
it?
But other than that, Airport is equal to IEEE 802.11, right? Can we
just buy a IEEE 802.11 card and have it work with Airport cards and
bases?
Thanks for the info.
It smells tantalizingly like PCMCIA because it's very close, but it
is deliberately broken so that it's not compatible with the regular
PCMCIA pinout. This allows Apple to sell AirPort cards for $100 USD
without creating a gray market supply of cheap IEEE 802.11 cards,
which would undercut everyone else in the world who is selling the
same thing for $150-200. When big companies cut special high volume
deals, ugly things happen. :)
=====
"Don't expect your own messiah; this neverworld which you desire is
only in your mind." -- http://www.dreamtheater.net/songb4.htm#IV5
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On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Dan Bethe wrote:
Hi there Tim. I'm not sure I entirely follow you on the marketing
issue of these cards or ports. Are you saying that Apple wants to
fracture the PCMCIA standard in general because they're able to make
the Airport cards far cheaper than the typical IEEE 802.11 vendor, and
so people would overwhelmingly purchase Apple's cards for general
wireless purposes rather than from the typical vendor?
I guess I didn't quite get the meaning of "gray market" :) Is that
it?
Pretty much. Grey market is most commonly used for things like video gear
where people buy camcorders in other countries and sell them in the U.S.
at less than the normal U.S. price. It's legal, but somewhat unethical.
The term can also apply to the resale of OEM products without the product
with which they were bundled originally, IIRC. I think that's the
definition being used here.
But other than that, Airport is equal to IEEE 802.11, right?
I believe so, yes, assuming that's the wireless ethernet spec #.
So, anybody want to build a pin-rearranger? ;-)
David
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So, anybody want to build a pin-rearranger? ;-)
David
Yes, I would like to build a pin rearranger. I am a cs student and rather new
to linux, but I have time and motivation to do it. Can any of you more
experienced developers tell me what to do to get started and maybe where to get
pinouts of the airport card and the standard pcmcia pinout? Any help or
direction would be greatly apprecieated.
Ryan
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At 12:56 PM -0800 2/23/00, Dan Bethe wrote:
Hi there Tim. I'm not sure I entirely follow you on the marketing
issue of these cards or ports. Are you saying that Apple wants to
fracture the PCMCIA standard in general
No, they're not trying to fracture it at all. If they wanted to
fracture the standard they'd be advertising the AirPort sockets as a
great way to put peripheral <whatever> in a Mac or PowerBook.
Instead they're treating it as a one-trick wonder: as far as Apple is
concerned, it's a slot for Apple-made AirPort cards and nothing else.
Note that they don't say PCMCIA or PC Card or CardBus anywhere in
their marketing material about AirPort cards.
(It probably isn't even a full PCMCIA implementation either.)
because they're able to make
the Airport cards far cheaper than the typical IEEE 802.11 vendor,
They're able to buy them real cheap (this is an OEM deal), and
allowed to pass the savings on to Apple customers, *if* they do
something to make sure their cards aren't interchangeable with others.
and
so people would overwhelmingly purchase Apple's cards for general
wireless purposes rather than from the typical vendor?
Well, let's put it this way: AirPort cards are $100 and base
stations $300, everybody else is charging $150-200 and I think $500+
for the same things.
I guess I didn't quite get the meaning of "gray market" :) Is that
it?
What David Gatwood said.
But other than that, Airport is equal to IEEE 802.11, right? Can we
just buy a IEEE 802.11 card and have it work with Airport cards and
bases?
Yes. The AirPort stuff is all IEEE 802.11 compliant; 802.11
specifies how the radios talk to each other, not the fine details of
how the computers talk to the radios.
Tim Seufert
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