Re: Apple does it again

[s-bytnar@uiuc.edu (Steven Bytnar)]

In article <5cti6i$ro8@uni.library.ucla.edu>, pubpc1@library.ucla.edu wrote:

> shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford) wrote:
> >Yeah no joke. All Apple is asking is for you to have a Mac introduced this
> >decade, or a IIci at the oldest. When you consider how much code it takes to
> >support the oldest boxes, the amount of testing to make it sure it works,
> >and compare that to the number of people with a 68000, '020, or IIx, IIcx,
> >or SE/30 who will actually upgrade, you can see why this decision was made.
> >I have an SE/30 myself, and I'm kinda bummed about not being able to run 7.6
> >on it, but I'm not gonna piss and moan about it. For one thing, I'm not sure
> >that any new features from 7.6 on would even be worthwhile on my old black
> >and white 16 MHz box.

Absolutely. I agree 100%! Apple's emulation of 68k on PowerPC is fast! A
604/132 runs in emulation at 2-3 times the speed of my 040@38MHz!

...<snip>...
> >-- 
> >Randy Shackelford                                 
> >shack@frii.com
> 
> It would be nice if Apple could provide an upgrade path for old computers.
> Remember the IIe to IIgs logic board swap?  That's what I mean.  You could
> always count on this with PCs, but not with Apple.

When Apple got back all those old logic boards, what do you think they had
to do with them? They 1) threw them away, 2) gave them away or 3) had to
store them somewhere. All of those options are costly no matter how you
look at it. (It costs money to get rid of stuff, find someone to give stuff
to, and even to store old hardware which would then be taking up space that
new hardware could take.) That is why it is profitable (for the
manufaturer) to have the consumer buy a new computer, rather than the
manufacturer to take back the old one for credit---which they probably
wouldn't even make as much money disposing of the old hardware than on the
credit that they give you.

> For example, Apple did not make the Mac able to run II software.  Think
> about how it pulled off the IIgs and you'd see it is not impossible or
> even infeasable. 

IMHO, the IIgs really was a big hack to just replace the processor of the
IIe with a 65816, and add on a bunch of hacked up enhancements (some of
which were cool though). The IIgs could have been a much better machine if
they would have abandoned the IIe hardware architecture. And then.. what if
they kept GS/OS as the OS for Macintosh? Lord knows I wouldn't want to be
using the GS/OS (System 6.01) API for programming Macs! Mac & IIgs toolbox
programming is similar, but the drastic architectural differences made the
best choice for Apple's developers to make a completely different toolbox.

> Another example is this current activity of dumping
> old Mac users.

I would like to propose this question concerning advancement of technology:
If you found out that all the telephone companies in the US got together,
and were going to run fiber optic cabling to every home in the US, but
would require you to buy a new telephone that had Internet capability,
video-confrencing, and voice mail all built in... do you think you would
want to 'get modern'? (Ignore the cost analysis and assume it to be similar
to computer pricing as if you were upgrading an XT to Pentium, or even the
performance difference between a IIci and the cheapest PowerMac/Performa
available today!! The performance of technology, and the COST has gone
down!)

> WHY doesn't Apple offer a logic board upgrade?  They want you to buy
> a whole new computer and make lots of money.

Guess what? Apple makes money on hardware, not software. Not because they
want you to buy a new computer, but because they produce technology that
works better on a higher performance, more modern machine. Albeit that
Apple still seems to charge a premium for their technology, they are a
single company providing an OS for their modern machines. The development
costs for making a modern OS compatible with an older, slower architecture
are high... not to say that it cannot be done. However, how slow do you
think a port of Rhapsody would be if they did make it compatible all the
way back to the 68000? There architectural differences between even an
000,020,030 and 040 that make/made it really tough for Apple to keep MacOS
as compatible as it was over the years, and those differences are also ones
that SLOW the machine down. The 32bit clean ROMs are required for System
7.6 because they were then able to remove all the legacy code that relied
on the OS having to deal with 24-bit addressing! (A performance increase
for the machines it is able to run on, with the price of making a few
models incompatible with it.)

> This strategy will backfire.

Maybe. But it's not really a strategy, it's a fact that technology causes
older technology to become obsolete.

> People will turn to PCs.  The Windows 95 interface, after all, is pretty
> darn good even though I don't agree with the company that made it.

Todays PC's are going to be extinct as soon as Intel releases the P7. It is
supposedly going to rely on new motherboard technology. (And a new
instruction set too... I think.) How many people in the PC world are going
to want to upgrade their PCs? (Maybe all the PC owners are so SNOWED by
Microsoft's Windows 95 that they believe that they must always have the
newest technology?) What if every PC manufacturer offered a tradein deal?!!
I've never heard of such an offer. They usually just force you to buy new,
and sell your old hardware.

Oh, and sorry, the Win95 interface is ok, (for a ripoff of other OSs) but
not darn good.

In summary, I wish everyone would quit complaining about how this is
Apple's bad policy, and they are trying to hurt their consumers by not
offering hardware trade-ins and are abandoning 68k's because they want us
all to buy PowerPC based hardware... if technology didn't change as quickly
as it does in the computer industry, we'd all be using computers the size
of a car.

One more rant... since Apple is going to use the Mach kernal for Rhapsody,
there really is no reason why they couldn't use NeXTSteps' 68k kernal to
keep the OS modern for 68ks. And this also leaves the possibility for
someone to write a kernal level Apple IIgs emulator even. =)

My $0.02 for being a Apple IIgs and 68K Mac owner & programmer,
--Steve


 Steven Bytnar    Computer Engineering   | "That is why it is called a
   http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/s-bytnar   |  development version. They
   U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign    |  don't even know if all the 
 ((ACM *)&SigMicro)->MacWarriors().chair |  bugs are _in_ it yet."