Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!sdcsvax!sdcrdcf!hplabs!sri-unix!A2DEH@MIT-ML.ARPA From: A2DEH@MIT-ML.ARPA Newsgroups: net.micro.apple Subject: Apple Shafts America; or, The Computer For the Rich of Us 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