PowerMac G4 and pcmcia flash cards

[Timothy A. Seufert]

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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