Re: Apple IIx

[Forrest <bctimes@hotmail.com>]

Rubywand wrote:

> > >As you say, the Apple II and its user base was still in good
> > >shape in 1984. Even so, the II series certainly was not "hot".
> >
> > In 1984 the II line sold 800,000 units, its best performance to
> > that date and possibly ever; according to the February 1985 issue
> > of Personal Computing it sold well enough to retake the top spot
> > in market share that IBM had won for the first time the year
> > before.
> >
> 
>The simple fact is that established II users were aware of being 'in
>the doldrums' regarding hardware development.

Established II users at the end of 1984 would be...people with IIs
and II Pluses, who were by then a minority of the Apple II population.
Everyone else had just made a kilobuck+ investment, and having just
bought the darn thing probably were not interested in buying another
right away.

> From the momement the PC arrived, we
> were aware that, obviously, the keyboard should be detached.

In hindsight, perhaps -- and then again perhaps not, judging from
the complaints I've been reading by pro writers about the PC
keyboard vs the old Selectric typewriter's.  A study would be
required to determine who's benefiting from relocatability (not me)
and who's just getting carpal tunnel syndrome.

>The Mac was in B&W; but, anyone could see that the high-res mouse
>& windows interface was way ahead of ours.

Of course, there was no standard Apple II interface until
AppleWorks came along.  AppleWorks of course being the major
app that calls the superiority of the mouse interface into
question.  (The major advantage of both being that they
put every almost program option at hand, either by putting
it in the menu bar or by listing it in the OA-? screen,
thereby reducing dependence on manuals.)

>And, some of the clone PC's were showing very nice text displays
>using fonts

...that might or might not print on your printer...

>and colors

...that definitely wouldn't print on a black-ribbon printer.

>      You talk about 800,000 sales in 1984-- so what?

So it was a record-breaking year after a record-breaking year.
Sales hadn't even reached a plateau despite the PC and Mac.
This was very much a "hot" product, which you denied above.

>we were acutely aware of falling ever farther behind the leading
>edge.

The leading edge being the PC/XT, the main advantage of which
was a built-in hard drive.  How long did it take Apple to figure
out the importance of built-in hard drives?

>      In fact, the //c was yet another reasonably successful
> product which proved to be a disappointment. As with the Mac,
> the real disappointment was that the great mass of current
> and potential users had no interest in closed-box,
> non-expandable computers.

...that you can't pick up and use on airplanes.

But we digress.  It was a hot product.  The enhancements
people really want can be tracked by what peripherals
they buy; see the ads in Softalk for what those were.
Mostly memory boards, high-capacity storage devices,
and accelerator boards as I recall.  The IIgs addressed
memory pretty well, storage pretty well, speed not quite
as well as the accelerator boards of the day.  It was
a terrific upgrade for the 8-bit AppleWorks fans; too
bad so many of them got the mistaken impression
it was all about graphics, sound, and being Mac-like.