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Re: How many times must Apple make such DRASTIC architecture changes?
Roger Johnstone wrote:
In <46GdnWDxMJohIzDfRVn-jQ@comcast.com> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
For example, I could never bring myself to pay Apple $500 for a $90
disk drive. I wound up participating in a group buy of Shugart
SA400's and cases, and hand-modified the standard "analog" board to
meet the Disk ][ interface. It took over a couple of hours per drive,
but the satisfaction of not getting ripped off was worth it. ;-)
I seem to remember reading that Apple paid about US$35 for their 5.25"
floppy drives (it might have been for the later Alps ones).
$35 for the Shugart drive seems about right. They really negotiated
them down by going for large volumes and no included "analog" board
or head load solenoid. The $90 price was what my group was able to
get on a purchase of about 25 standard SA 400's, IIRC.
So, recapping the Apple Disk ][ (a wonderful piece of digital design,
BTW), we have a $35 drive cost, a $5 case cost, a $15 controller cost,
and a $4 manual cost, plus a $3 software disk (I'm generous) for a
total cost to Apple of about $50-$60, which they sold for $495.
As you can see, their hardware multiplier is alive and well!
Back when my main computer was still an Apple IIe I thought I'd get a 3.
5" floppy drive. I never considered a hard drive since they would
obviously be too expensive, and 800KB of storage was plenty for 8-bit
Apple II software.
I walked into my local Apple dealer and asked the price for an Apple
floppy drive plus controller card. It was about the same as the computer!
Then the dealer pointed out I could buy an Apple SCSI card and he could
supply a used 20MB drive in an external SCSI case for slighty less. So I
ended up getting a hard drive instead. Best purchase I ever made,
because 12 years later I'm still using the same SCSI card in my IIGS and
it's worth almost as much today as I paid for it.
Clever dealer, too. ;-)
Apple created a huge price umbrella for third-party manufacturers,
which is, perhaps, why so many came to exist. Crazy like a fox.
Of course, the synergy that grew the Apple II industry (and therefore
Apple Inc.) into a behemoth was all financed by users willingly paying
the unusually high markups "standardized" by Apple.
"We built this city..."
-michael
8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/