Re: Apple ///?

[shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford)]

In article <1APR199702301346@vax2.concordia.ca>,
Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:

[snip]

>    The Apple III was not meant as an immediate replacement, but certainly
>an eventual one. Development on the Apple II line was put on hold during
>the years the III existed, notice the gap in years from the Apple II Plus
>(1979) until the Apple IIe (1983)? Furthermore, if Apple truly planned to
>support both lines, why did they purposely cripple the Apple II emulation
>mode on the III? Why didn't they release an enhanced Apple II model then?
>They were trying to discourage interest in the Apple II, that's why.

OK so that means that since the Corvette design didn't change from 1968
to 1982, Chevrolet was trying to discourage interest in the Corvette?
Interesting. I think it was more of a case of if it's not broken, don't
fix it. Then when it came time to update the box and add features, out
came the //e.

As far as a replacement for the II, I think that was never the intention.
Apple has always had low end boxes and high end boxes, which can run a lot of
the same software. For example, the Mac SE and II came out at roughly the
same time. One had fewer features and cost less, the other more features and 
cost more. But a Mac II can run the software an SE can and more.

>    As for the Lisa, it was supposed to be the future of the company. The
>Mac was just a scaled down and cheaper version of it (kind of like a baby
>Lisa). The Lisa turned out to be a failure, so they ended up pushing the
>Mac instead, although I'm not sure they had it planned that way.

That might appear to be so if they ran the same software, but they don't.

>    That's a fair number (more than I originally thought) but peanuts 
>compared to the number of Apple II machines sold (6-8 million was it?). 
>I'm sure even pre-Mac Pluses sold topped that number. It's a significant 
>amount, but still few enough where III's are not all that common.

You mean 6-8 million from '77 to '93? It only makes sense to compare how
many IIs sold during the III's lifespan. I'd have to locate my Apple II
Guide or something to find that kind of info.

>    I just read they laid off something like 4000-5000 workers a few weeks
>back. Come to think of it, each time I see something about Apple mentioned
>in the business section of the newspaper, it's more bad-news. I'm still
>watching to see what happens, but I'm wouldn't buy stock in the company. ;)

They're getting seriously harsh treatment in the press. Someone over in
comp.sys.mac posted a bunch of bad press stories dating clear back to '85.
That's nothing new, and the company still keeps going. Check out the
"dose of reality" section on Apple's page for another point of view.

>    Apple has had a history of abandoning it's users in terms of support.
>I've seen it done with the Apple III, the Lisa and first hand as an
>Apple II owner (lately I've even seen repeating trends with the Mac).
>It's rather like patting a dog and getting your hand bit, your not going
>to try and pat the dog again so quickly. Still, this is only part of it,
>just a bad taste in my mouth and probably others out there. If Apple were
>selling technology I liked, I'd probably hold back my gripes and purchase
>from them again. Unfortunately the Mac has failed to catch my interest,
>and I'm turned off by the low-quality hardware they're now being made up
>of (at one time if you bought Apple hardware, you _knew_ it was quality,
>but today they're cutting back and throwing any junk at the users in hopes
>that they'll be computer "newbies" and not know any better). There is
>a whole list of reasons why I don't see a future for Apple, and there
>most likely won't be, unless things drastically change...

Actually the newbies who don't know any better are the ones who end up with
PCs since they tend to buy what salesdroids push on 'em. And that isn't
Apple. The big stores usually put their pitiful selection of Apple boxes on 
a back wall or in another obscure place. Then there are places like the local
Computer City which has a password protected screen saver on the Macs so you 
can't even look at them. Utterly ridiculous.

>    I'm talking about the Apple IIgs, it was different from the rest of
>the Apple II line. You won't get any argument from me about pushing the
>Apple IIe, IIc or IIc+ in the 90's, that would have been a mistake. They
>could however, have updated the IIgs, just as they did with the original
>Mac 128 (as someone else mentioned here a few months ago). Had they done
>that, I'll bet they wouldn't have lost most of the home and education
>market to PC clones. They had their foot in the door there, but yanked it
>out and came back later with Macs as a solution -- bad move (yes, the Mac
>is a fine computer, but an evolved IIgs would have been a better solution
>for home users and schools. Or at the very least, Apple could have held
>onto that market longer). What was even the point of the IIgs if they
>were just planning to kill it all along?

Take a look at the school market survey I pointed out in another article.

>>Well remember that it's only ][ plus emulation, which, if you supported more
>>stuff than a ][ plus could do, wouldn't qualify as emulation any more. And
>>would cause compatibility problems if people wrote apps to use III features
>>under emulation. Considering that, I'd say the decision makes sense.
>
>    Well, what about adding chips to the motherboard to _prevent_ programmers 
>from writing their own emulation boot disk to take advantage of the advanced
>features? I don't know, but a company that goes out of it's way to cripple
>their product doesn't stand up well in my eyes. Not qualify as emulation
>anymore? It was standard for Apple II Pluses to have 64K RAM, in fact lots
>of old software required that amount to run. You couldn't use more than 48K
>on the III. What about allowing users to use lowercase characters, would that
>have been so terrible? If you want to follow that logic, then the Apple IIgs
>should not have allowed it's Apple IIe emulation anymore than 64K (what was
>supplied on the motherboard) or faster speed, since it wouldn't qualify as
>emulation anymore. Maybe there should have been chips on the motherboard
>on the GS to block access to SHR graphics and the Ensoniq?

Apple strongly discouraged people from writing half assed native apps which
ran under ProDOS 8 and used IIgs features, but people did it anyway. They
took a more hard line approach with II emulation on IIIs I guess. As far
as memory requirements, you gotta stay in the right time frame. In the III
era, the main reason for having 64K was to be able to load the version
of BASIC which isn't built in. There's a reason why 16K memory cards were
called language cards. Since the emulation boot disk let you choose which
BASIC to use, there goes the most common reason to have 64K.

Clock speed is one thing when it comes to emulation using the host machine's
native features, and memory expansion too, but stuff like supporting lower
case chars when the emulated box does not is overstepping the bounds of
what you can call emulation. That's like calling the hybrid ProDOS 8 IIgs
apps //e programs. They're nothing of the sort since they won't run on a //e.

>    How about that and not adding more memory to the motherboard, not
>allowing anymore than 4 MB of DMA memory in the expansion slot, never
>adding stereo output or a digitizer input. Not adding a measly extra
>64K of RAM for the Ensoniq chip for that matter. How about leaving the
>graphics limited to only 16 colors per scanline, 200 lines vertical
>resolution, no internal hardrive/floppy drives (or motherboard support
>for FDHD SuperDrives or SCSI). I could probably name a dozen more ways
>it was left crippled. Even price for that matter, why did Apple keep
>the price of the IIgs so high for years, while dropping the prices on
>Macs? Like I once said before, if the engineers at Apple couldn't
>figure out how to add more memory to the motherboard, or how to stick
>a faster 65C816 on there or update the VGC to support more color
>depth and resolution, maybe then it's no wonder they're now on the
>verge of disappearing.

Anachronistic thinking again. Even in '89, when ROM 3 came out, 5 mb was a
LOT of memory and it cost a LOT of money. Macs topped out at 8 mb in those
days. Superdrives barely existed then, and SCSI was available. I'm guessing
that the RAMfast owning readers would be a tad unhappy if they were locked 
into using a rev C speed SCSI port if SCSI were built in. Superdrive cards
came out, and didn't sell worth a hoot. Maybe the sales of VOCs and superdrive
cards were part of the reason why the ethernet card never came out. As far
as updated features go, some people have said in this group that the majority
of IIgses ended up in schools used as fancy //e's. If Apple's marketing
bore that out, it's not hard to see why they would consider the existing 
features adequate and not sink dollars into updating 'em. Having no successor
to the 65816 forthcoming didn't help.

>    Apple is not some kindhearted, caring company. In fact they don't
>even seem capable of making levelheaded business decisions (putting
>so much effort into killing a successful product is not a way to be
>profitable). I disagree with people who blindly bash the Macintosh
>because Apple choose it over the Apple II (I like to judge a machine
>for the machine itself, not the company) but by the same token, I
>no more like it when Apple blindly praise Apple and pretend what
>they did in the past didn't happen (or try and find logic in it).

Amelio's Apple is not Spindler's Apple. Nor Sculley's Apple for that matter.
Amelio has Apple's market share up and will have the company profitable
again. They also put out the best engineered, most innovative products
on the market. The fastest notebook computer on the planet is a good
example. I'll be buying their products for a long time to come. A really
good reason why is a line I saw one time in a Mac newsgroup:

What are you doing to oppose the Microsoft juggernaut?
-- 
Randy Shackelford                                 
shack@frii.com