Re: Apple IIx

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Bruce.Baker@juge.com (Bruce Baker) wrote:

>THIS was my recollection as well.  Without figures in front of me it seems the
>//gs was never a very popular machine.  It never outsold the //e and most of
>the computers were bought by schools to be faster //e's.

Problem was, this type of image was the creation of Apple.  The IIGS
was a very popular machine it its own right.  In its first year, when
Apple was actively marketing it, the IIGS outsold the entire Mac line.
Heck, even an Amiga owning friend licked his lips at the specs for
the IIGS sound chip.  Compute! named the IIGS as one of the most
popular units of the time.

The next year, Apple was so scared that the IIGS would compete
against the Mac that they cut all advertising and channeled IIGS
profits to Mac R&D and marketing.  And that's how the IIGS was
deep-sixed by Apple.

>The //gs was adopted by fanatics (enthusiasts) like us as their favorite
>machine and those people moved to the gui interface.
>
>But many //gs's never got hard drives.  They were booted from floppies just 
>like a //e.

Again, Apple never came out with later IIGS units that had hard
drives.  Apple never wanted the IIGS to succeed.  If they had
built on the momentum of that first year, things would have been
different.

>Now the ones that have been salvaged from school dumpsters and old warehouses
>are being sooped up with hard drives and such.  But originally this was too
>expensive.

The main problem was Apple.  Apple never seriously wanted the
IIGS to succeed.  From 1986 to 1992, the IIGS design did not
change and Apple did not lower its price.  Meanwhile, they
improved Macs AND lowered Mac prices.

Think about it.  If Apple improved the IIGS design, they would have
risked (in their eyes) competing against their baby, the Mac.  If
they would have left it as is but lowered the price (made it the
Commodore 64 of the '90s), that too would have endangered the
Mac.  So they did neither and commited infanticide.  And lost
a lot of users fed up with Apple who defected to the PC rather
than go Mac.