Re: Apple's ways

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

wbdesnoy@acs5.acs.ucalgary.ca (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.  I'm not kidding

I guess what I am saying is this: it is true that a lot of the Apple
hardware is slicker than your average PC clone hardware.  But
if you made all the Apple hardware PC compatible and sold it to
the computer audience at large at the SAME price that Apple
now sells to Mac users, the Apple hardware would not sell.  That
is why Apple has kept such a tight reign on the hardware rather
than pulling down all compatibility barriers.  Think about it.  How
much engineering would it really take to get that Apple TFT
display to be PC compatible?  Not much I suspect.  Competition
is all about price/performance ratio (or price-quality ratio if you
look at it that way).  Mac users are a captive market.

>when I say that pre-1995 Macintoshes are built better than 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).

For a time, there were Mac "Winmodems" too although they
didn't call them that.  Controllerless nonetheless.

But you don't understand the PC market.  If you are an Apple II
users, chances are you won't be buying your PC, you will be
BUILDING your PC.  There are high quality components in the
PC market and there are poor quality components.  I have a
CHOICE and I can choose to build with high quality components.

For example, I can choose an ATX case because it has a superior
layout.  I can choose an AMD approved 300W power supply
because it is powerful and I know it is superior.  I can choose my
high performance Athlon CPU.  Sure, I could go cheap and get an
Intel Celeron but I could also go with the quality AMD product.

I've built a couple of PCs and I have used high quality displays,
fast hard drives, and good cases with keyed connectors and all.
And the video and sound cards of my choice.  To me, these
custom units with high quality parts are every bit as excellent in
fit and finish as my Apple IIGS the day I took it out of the box
new those many years ago.

>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.  A five year transition period is insufficent.  There were seven
>years between my purchase of new systems.  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.

Ok, this is what I mean:

In 1997, I had an AT formfactor unit with 3GB of storage and a
2D accelerator video card and system memory at 32MB with
150Mhz IBM processor.  In 1998, added 8GB hard drive.  In
1999, switched from EDO to SDRAM at 64MB and SCSI bus
was added.  In 2000, added CD-RW and TV card and
increased processor to 500Mhz and a 3D acclerator.  In 2001,
upgraded an case with processor speed increased to 616Mhz
and memory to 128MB and 30GB hard disk drive.  Next step,
upgrading the motherboard to Socket A and processor speed
to 1.3Ghz or 1.4Ghz (about $200 for both).

Now in one sense, you may say I have a completely different
computer now.  But there was continuity in every step of the
way.  Upgrading is a non-stop process.  It is how you keep
step with computer advances.  The problem with Macs is that
you can't upgrade in this way.  You have to scrap the whole
machine and get a new one in one fell swoop.  You can do
that with a PC too but in the PC world, you have a choice.

Transitional continuity is what I am talking about.  The different
peripherals in a system have different life spans.  You should
not be forced to junk the entire system based the the life span
of its weakest link.  For example, in 1998, the weak link in my
system was the memory, so I switched from EDO to SDRAM.
Right now, the weak link is processor and bus speed but no
problem, I can upgrade these since the rest of my system is
quite new now because each part was replaced at its own
time.  At each point, the overall performance of the system is
quite modern.

In the Macintosh way, this wouldn't be.  Apple's only choices
to you are wait 7 years and suffer with weaker and weaker
performance relative to the industry standard until you buy
your next Mac or shell out the bucks and toss the Mac for a
new one sooner.  That's what you get without continuity.
This is why you don't seem to get my point.  Of course if I
waited seven years, NONE of my system would be worth
keeping.  But I upgrade a few parts every year so that overall
the system is ALWAYS up to date!