Message-ID: <515@nmtvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 22-Sep-84 21:56:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: nmtvax.515
Posted: Sat Sep 22 21:56:36 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Sep-84 06:01:02 EDT
Organization: New Mexico Tech, Socorro, N.M.
Lines: 92

It was interesting to see the comments posted by Mike Conley and Mike Ward
re: the 512 Mac upgrade.  Herein I'd like to exaplain a few things they
missed, and so here I go:

 >>  = Mike Conley (...unm-cvax!cs4911ay)
|| = Mike Ward (...hao!ward)

 >>  ... When the Mac was fiist announced, the
 >>  price was $1995...

I never saw $1995 as an "announced" price.  I did see it as a "predicted"
price, but that wasn't Apple talking.

 >>  ... Then, when it
 >>  finally saw the light of day, filtered through display windows, the price
 >>  had somehow escalated to $2495 -- for the bare-bones system, of course.

Bare bones?  I don't know what most people consider "bare bones", but I
doubt that a computer equipped with the equivalent of a monitor, a disk
drive, serial ports, extra disk port, a mouse and $200 worth of software
fits that description.

 >>  ... We all sprung our $2995 for the Mac and the printer, and
 >>  shortly afterwards realized that the thing was absolutely useless without
 >>  the second disk drive.

I realized that after playing with one in the store for about fifteen minutes.
That's one of the reasons that I didn't buy one when it first came out. I
guess what happened to you is what happens when someone doesn't play around
extensively with something before he buys it.

 >>  ...a workable system sells for $4485.

Huh?  $4485?  Where did THAT figure come from?  Right now a 128K Mac with
a printer can be had for $2395, plus the $995 upgrade, that's about $3400.
What's the extra $1100 for?

 >>  ... They should properly be giving the damn thing [512K upgrade] away
 >>  for the price of labor, since the price hike in the beginning covers
 >>  what the upgrade should be costing now.

Hah!  There never was a "price hike", just a lot of surprised people when
the figure the computer magazines gave turned out to be $500 low.  As for
giving it away for labor cost, why should Apple give away two 256K chips
and all the hardware changes that come with the higher port speeds? Apple
has a responsiblity to its stockholders as well as its customers.

|| ... Apple has dropped the price (effective someday) by $300.

"Someday" is now.  List on a 128K mac is now $2195.

|| ...before the Mac, the only decent thing they [Apple]
|| produced was little more than a toy, and that they have
|| produced failure after failure - if the Mac had not sold well
|| that company would now be worth zip!

HUH?  Accepting for the moment (even though I don't) that the //e is
"little more than a toy", Apple's only really significant failure was
the Apple ///.  The Lisa actually sold as many as Apple predicted, just
not as many as they had hoped.  Had Mac not taken off, the increased
popularity of the //e after the PCjr came out would assuredly kept the
company's head above water, assuming it was in any real danger in the
first place.

|| ...Is anybody going to be stupid enough to buy a Fat Mac at $3100?

Probably a lot more people than those who were stupid enough to buy
a computer for $2500 on the basis of a neat commercial and lots of
promises :-).

Lessons Learned:

	Don't buy a computer just because it is "cute" or even
	"insanely great".  Buy it because you know it can do
	everything (or at least most everything) you want it to
	do for the forseeable future.  Don't buy a computer without
	the software you need.  If the salesman says "someday", wait
	for "someday", or if you can't, get another machine.  And
	last but never least, don't buy a computer you want to do
	serious work on until it has been on the market for at least
	nine months.  If you buy before that, be prepared for broken
	promises and some surprises.  Just think, if the two Mikes
	had waited until now to get their Macs, they could have had
	a much better system for only $700 more.  I doubt that they
	would have been any worse off for the time without the Macs.

Come on guys, if you don't want to get shafted, don't bend over.

		.rne.
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