After persistent rumors that German Mac upgrade manufacturer Met@box has pulled up stakes, sold remaining stock to Mac hardware clearing house Other World Computing, and ceased US operations, MacCentral today confirmed that Met@box will no longer be selling its JoeCARD G3 and G4 upgrades. “Met@box’s primary business is the interactive set top box market,” said Met@box USA President Clint Giles. “We developed our upgrade card products to generate revenue while our main products were in development.”
Met@box USA entered the US Mac upgrade market in spring of last year. The company produced a variety of G3 and G4 upgrades. One of their upgrades, the JoeCARD G4 Z 450MHz, was the only G4 upgrade in the market to feature a 2MB backside cache.
Giles said that Met@box decided to exit the Mac upgrade market two or three weeks ago. “We made our decision based upon the overall slump in the computer market coupled with Apple’s attractive pricing of new Macs,” said Giles. He also confirmed that Met@box USA has cleared its existing upgrade inventory through OWC. Giles also said that Met@box will continue to support its products.
Met@box decided to manufacture G3 and G4 upgrades because a number of the company’s personnel have a great deal of experience with the PowerPC and the Macintosh. These products were well received in Europe, and Austin based Met@box USA was charged with bringing them to the US market. “But, we never made much of a market penetration in the US,” said Giles.
XLR8 and Met@box had a brief legal run in that may have contributed to Met@box’ exit. “We threatened Met@box USA with an injunction based upon finding our code within their G4 products’ driver software,” said VP and General Manager of XLR8 Jack Kolk. Giles told MacCentral that the code in question was supplied by a German contractor and that Met@box’s software, in use from last September onwards, is not at issue.
Giles stresses that Met@box as a whole is still operating, and that the major reason for its exit from the Mac upgrade business is to focus on its new interactive set top box products. Met@box also makes a line of FireWire hard drives. Giles said that these and other peripherals for their set top boxes may “fit nicely into the Mac and PC markets.”