Re: What's to become of the Apple II?

[ballwebr@holmes.ece.orst.edu (Brian Ballweber)]

rubywand@aol.com wrote:
:      Apple, Inc. seems to agree. They appear to be getting out of the
: P-Mac manufacturing business. More and more, Mac's will be made by
: cloners.
[cut]
:      Is Apple "going down pretty quickly"? The company does appear to be
: engaged in a 'controlled collapse'. A risk is that, at some point, income
: will fail to match projections and the collapse will be impossible to
: halt.

Funny, controlled collapse must mean preparing to rake in lots of money
where you are from.  I doubt most people including Apple would agree with 
your assesment of the situation.  In fact, given the recent announcement 
of Exponential to begin manufacturing its 533Mhz PPC chip early next year, 
I would bet that Apple's outlook is quite a bit more optimistic.

Here is a cut from the exponential press release:
<the full press release is at: http://www.exp.com/press/pr961021.html>

"Today's announcement will cause the industry to stand up and take notice," 
said Satjiv Chahil, Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Apple 
Computer. "We think the Exponential X704 has the potential to redefine PC 
multimedia computing, and bring a major competitive advantage to the
PowerPC platform and the Macintosh product family. This innovation should 
be especially attractive to power-Macintosh users who demand uncompromised 
performance for their high-end graphics and multimedia applications."


Now I'm a GS user myself, and in my small amount of spare time I enjoy
coding on it, but the facts are that the GS was given a relatively low
powered 16-bit CISC processor <and I can argue for days on why the
'816 is not even RISC in the slightest bit>, and it does not compare
to any of the modern super-scalar RISC designs that are now coming out.
Apple is not going to produce any more GSs because simply put no-one 
wants them.  The facts are that there will not be another 32-bit version
of the '816 because its architecure is relatively weak.  People don't
start building processors to make an inferior processor.  There is no 
money in it, and in the end thats what its all about, money.


- Brian / DE
  MSEE Student
  Oregon State University