Message-ID: <12545@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Oct-84 11:34:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12545
Posted: Mon Oct  1 11:34:00 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 6-Oct-84 08:21:34 EDT
Lines: 58

From:  "Donald E. Hopkins" 


    Date: 20 Sep 84 10:52:21-PDT (Thu)
    From: ihnp4!cbosgd!cbdkc1!desoto!packard!hoxna!kfl at UCB-VAX.ARPA
    Re:   Apple Shafts America; or, The Computer For the Rich of Us

    Come on guys, be real.  A 512KB dynamic board for ANY personal
    computer is going to cost around $1000.  Maybe a little less from
    the discount joints, but still not cheap.
    -- 
    Kenton Lee, Bell Labs - WB
    wb3g!kfl or hoxna!kfl

This is quite correct, but there is no such thing as a 640K Mac.
[Yet.] For $1000, you do not get 512K more memory -- you get 384K.
The standard Mac, costing $1000 less than a fat one, has 128K to start
with. I doubt you could talk your Apple dealer into giving you the
128K that he or she pulls out of your Mac to do the upgrade, the way
your mechanic gives you the dead parts out of your car that were
replaced.  128K [What a normal Mac has] + 384K [What your $1000 buys]
= 512K [As in the phrase "512K Mac"] It's also quite correct that the
people who ran out and bought a Mac when they first came out payed an
inflated, premium price. What else would you expect? If you don't need
a product immediatly, and you're interested in getting a reasonably
good deal, you would be stupid to go out and buy it right when it hits
the market. If you don't want to get ripped off, then wait until the
price has dropped. If you are mad that Apple dropped their prices to
below what you paid for your Mac when it first came out, then at least
you have learned something, and that's good, because I won't have to
listen to your complaints about how you got nailed any more. I waited
until the price dropped below $500 before I got my Okidata 92. It took
a bit of waiting, but was worth it, because at $500, it had one of the
best price/performance ratios on the market. I needed it before it got
below $500, but I could afford to wait a little bit. Now the price has
dropped even more. I think I've seen them for $420. But it was worth
the extra $60 to have the printer between when I bought it and now. I
don't bitch about how evil Okidata is. All of these complaints about
how much more expensive the extra memory is are silly. Eventually,
it's going to be dirt cheap. Before you people who are so new to the
computer world that you haven't ever seen a 4116, let alone a 4096,
start whining about the price of memory, just go page through an old
Byte from a few years back. There is a reason that a 24K program like
Wordstar was thought of as huge. 24K or RAM cost a whole lot. In
1979, I bought two rows of 16K RAM chips for only $218. It was a
steal, because I was buying "generic" chips, not the official Apple
16K upgrade kits, which cost a quite bit more. At that price, 384K
would cost $2616! I hate to think how much 384K worth of official
upgrade kits would have cost. But at the time I bought it, that was a
very good price, and I needed the extra memory. I have not
entertained the notion of pounding on Computerland's door [One of the
only computer stored around my area at the time] and demanding that
they give me a rebate. [I bitch about how evil Computerland is for
more realistic, substantial reasons.] So stop feeling sorry for
yourselves. You've got a good computer. Do something with it that will
put you ahead of all of the people who are waiting for the price to
drop.
	-Don