Re: The sad Truth about iMac:

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Randy Shackelford <shack@onyx.southwind.net> wrote:

>John L. Graham <fl332@cleveland.freenet.edu> wrote:
>
>: that wasn't born with one foot in the grave. Even open-architecture Macs
>: tend to be of questionable life span as Apple obsoletes the latest and
>: greatest so fast. If I were looking at a compact portable machine
>
>The industry obsoletes the latest and greatest so fast. And as for the life
>span of Apple's stuff, support for my '93 vintage Q840av and Powerbook 520c 
>and '91 Q700 was only dropped when OS 8.5 came out. I recall Jobs complaining
>during a speech that Mac owners don't upgrade as often as the Windows crowd.
>It's a credit to the company that their products have such a useful life span.

Like I said before, the products from Apple are usually great.  Heck,
many of us are still using Apple IIGS units introduced back in 1986.
We've upgraded to >1GB hard drives, laser and ink jet printers, fast
modems (28.8 or faster), TCP/IP, FAX, 8MB of RAM, Zip drives,
CD-ROM drives, SVGA displays with 1024x768 resolution, 24-bit
color, web browsing on the IIGS, even ftp and email are possible and
a UNIX type shell plus pre-emtive multitasking are available for free
and many of us have accelerated the IIGS seven times over.

But you know why Apple owners don't upgrade as often?  Two
reasons.  First, yes Apple does make products that have a very useful
lifespan.  But second, Apple keeps going on to "the next big thing"
and rarely leaves users with a transition.  Thus, users tend to not
want to upgrade as much.

For example, if I have a bunch of ADB devices and SCSI devices
and 3.5" disks, I'd be wary of upgading to the new iMac or G3
because I would not want to spend extra on adapters.  Similarly,
back when Apple cut of the Apple IIGS from the future by having
incompatible Macs, I could not imagine abandoning my investment
just to follow Apple's whim and go with Macs.

But when the Windows PC industry goes from one model to the
other, what happens?  They ALWAYS let you take the software
and peripherals from AT LEAST the past several upgrade cycles
with you.  If I wanted to upgrade to the latest AMD-K6 3D chip
running at 400Mhz+ in an ATX form factor motherboard with
USB built in, I know that I can also take my PC expansion cards
with me and that the motherboard also has IDE on board so that
I can take my current hard drives and that the new PC also
supports 3.5" drives, PS/2 style keyboard/mice connectors,
serial and parallel ports, etc.

I do not see why adding backward compatibility to AT LEAST
the past one or two revision cycles means added complexity.
I mean, the USB and PS/2 connectors and serial and parallel
ports look very different.  A user would have to be pretty
dumb to mistaken one for the other.