Re: Apple's ways

[Roy Miller <millers@inebraska.com>]

Byron Desnoyers Winmill wrote:

> Supertimer (supertimer@aol.com) wrote:
> : wbdesnoy@acs5.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron Desnoyers Winmill) wrote:
> : >The competition seems to drive the market towards the same
> : >low quality solutions.
>
> : Competition is the greatest engine of ingenuity which results in HIGH
> : quality solutions.  If what you say about competition was correct,
> : the free market should have collapsed, communist central planning
> : succeeded and today the best consumer goods should be coming
> : from the still extant Soviet Union, right?
>
> You're twisting the context.  If today's computers were high quality
> solutions, and the software functioned as advertised, the industry would
> collapse in the lack of demand from satisfied customers.

The error here is that the hardware is advancing so rapidly that people often
feel like their current machine is insufficient for what they need to do. And,
if they are upgrading to the current Microsoft products, they are right.

> I'm not kidding
> when I say that pre-1995 Macintoshes are built better than modern PCs.

And 1950 Chevys are better built than 2000 Buicks, or Caddies for that matter.
I'd still rather have a more modern car, and for work, a more modern computer.

BTW, what about post `95 Macs compared to modern PCs?

>
> Just look at the details.  For some reason the Wintel industry believes
> that the pennies it saves by using inadequate connectors, by creating
> cases with poor power supplies and poorly planned case layouts (re: the
> popping VESA cards), by shipping fuzzy monitors, mushy keyboards and the
> cheapest of mice (yeah, Apple is guilty of that one too).  Then they come
> up with gizmos like Winmodems, which chop down the cost of peripherals
> while dumping the work onto your CPU (which several people have suggested
> are unreliable anyway).
>
> And as to the continuity of PC standards: they are of negligable value
> if you upgrade every five to eight years since virtually everything has
> changed.

But upgrading is usually done on a three year (or less) cycle.
In that case salvaging some of the older hardware reducing the cost from just
buying a whole new machine.

> A five year transition period is insufficent.

5 years ago, on the PC Win 95 was the top of the line, and fast 486s were still
common.
M$Office 97 was still a year away.
Novell still owned WordPerfect office.
You could still buy 68K software for the Mac.
And MacOS 7.5.x was the top of that line

5 years is two full generations of desktop hard/software

> There were seven
> years between my purchase of new systems.

Did you do no upgrading of anything in that time period?
While that might be smart, in terms of cost and training, I doubt that you
could use Netscape 4.7 to web browse in 7 years, and that the 1 ghz machines of
today could run the IE or Netscape of 2008.

Roy

> By that point, most of my
> peripherals from the 486 would have had to be tossed.  The monitor would
> have worked.  It was purchased in 1996 anyway, because the old one lasted
> a meager 4 years.  The keyboard may have worked, with an inexpensive PS/2
> adapter.  The mouse would have hogged a serial port.  The SCSI card would
> have used the 'only' ISA slot (bye-bye remaining ISA peripherals).  It was
> an AT case, which means that I would need a new case or a special mainboard.
> My small fortune in 1992 vintage RAM would have been a tosser (16MB would be
> insufficent anyway).  The largest hard drive, about 720MB purchased in 1995,
> would have been grossly insufficent for modern software.  Buying hardware
> which worked with OS/2, my prefered OS on the Wintel, would have been an
> adventure to say the least.
>
> In otherwords, after seven years it simply did not matter whether my new
> system was a Macintosh or Wintel.  I choose Macintosh because I was
> generally pleased with the longevity of Apple hardware.  Whether that hold
> for modern Apple hardware is another issue.

Well, let's go back 7 years in the Mac line. 1994. You could still buy an LCIII
in 1994 (6803@25/50 mhz) My Performa 630 was introduced in July of 1994.
68LC040@33/66 mhz. Can barely run MacOS 8. How much hardware would I use from
it? The 72 pin simms? The c. 350 meg IDE harddrive? The Superdrive? How about
the Performa monitor? What about longevity? That model was discontinued the
next year.

What about top of the line 8100 AV? 601 at 80 mhz. A real screamer! Can't run
OS 9 can it? How useful would it's 72 pin simms be? Or it's ADB keyboard?  How
about it's 2X CD? Or it's 250mg to 1gb hard drive?

It seems to me that 7 years has done the same to Apple top, middle and bottom
lines has it has done to PCs. And no one should condemn either for the march of
time and progress.

Jobs has done an amazing job in saving the company, and giving the customers
what they want. Apple is once again "cool" rather than being a sick joke. PC
people have no reason to snicker at Apple owners any longer. But Apple isn't so
great that Mac owners have a right to sneer at PC people.

Are you buying a tool to do a job, or buying a status symbol?

Perhaps that's why the PC is so common.

Roy

>
>
> And yeah, I used an Apple IIe *exclusivly* for several months.  It could
> 'run' lynx, elm, TeX and Maple since I have the benefit of an AIX system
> with plenty of non-GUI software at the other end of my connection.  I
> doubt that their systems have been upgraded in the last four years either.
> Then came the second hand Macs (the ones which pleased me with their
> quality), and a couple of years later came the iMac.
>
> Byron.