Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!apple!lsr
From: lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Computer for the rest of us?
Message-ID: <17578@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 23 Sep 88 03:05:57 GMT
References: <430043@hpcea.CE.HP.COM> <11540170@hpsmtc1.HP.COM>
Reply-To: lsr@apple.com.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein)
Organization: Advanced Technology Group, Apple Computer
Lines: 48

(I probably will regret posting this, but here goes.)

In article <11540170@hpsmtc1.HP.COM> dlw@hpsmtc1.HP.COM (David Williams) writes:
>
>I think the answer is that it died when Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell
>Smith, Guy Kawasaki all left Apple.

Do you long for the days when a 128K machine cost $2000 - 2500?  This is not
to disparage the efforts of those people, but simply to point out that all
was not perfect back in 1984.

>Apple does not care about us anymore...their prices reflect that. To my mind
>the minimal Macintosh is a Mac II with at least 2 megs of memory, Color and
>at least a 90 meg hard disk. How many individuals will be able to afford this
>at the rate Apple's prices are going? Not many I assure you. 

Why is this the minimal Macintosh?  I doubt that many individuals would buy
such a configuration from any vendor.

I doubt that anyone at Apple took great joy in raising prices.  If Apple was
out to get every dollar possible, don't you think we would have raised
prices a while ago?  The demand for machines hasn't gone up only recently;
it has been high for quite a while.  Memory has been tight for many months.
It would have been very easy to raise the price of CPUs at the same time we
raised the price of memory upgrades.

>However a word of caution that I hope the Apple employes on the net
can communicate up their management chain:
>
>There are a lot of little guys (I call them Change Agents) that you are
>leaving behind.

You are doing this yourself.  As someone pointed out, this newsgroup (among
others) is summarized and distributed to hundreds of people internally who
wouldn't otherwise read Usenet.

>What is the REAL cost.  differential of using a 25 mhrz 68030 in the Mac
>IIx or even a 33m?  Why didn't the SE ship with a 68000 at 16mhrz?

It seems anomalous to me to complain about high prices in one paragraph and
then about engineering changes such as these which would only increase the
cost of the machines.  

		 Larry Rosenstein,  Object Specialist
 Apple Computer, Inc.  20525 Mariani Ave, MS 46-B  Cupertino, CA 95014
	    AppleLink:Rosenstein1    domain:lsr@Apple.COM
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