Re: Apple's ways

[wbdesnoy@acs5.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron Desnoyers Winmill)]

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
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).

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.

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.

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.