Re: Apple Drops Backward Compatibility for Next MacOS

[christw@lexis-nexis.com (Christopher C. Wood)]

In article <54u5ci$285u@uni.library.ucla.edu>, pubpc1@library.ucla.edu writes:
|> christw@lexis-nexis.com (Christopher C. Wood) wrote:
|> >In article <24OCT199621281979@vax2.concordia.ca>, spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) writes:

|> >|>     Agreed! I'm rather tired of hearing that stereotypical response
|> >|> spoken out so often, claiming the Apple II is "'70's technology";

|> >It was.

|> Some Apple II's were.  The IIc/IIe/IIc+ were argurably largely 80's
|> technology.

They were always 8-bit machines with a 64K address spaces.  Some fancy
tricks to push that address space, but it really got in the way. 

|> The Apple IIGS was DEFINETLY NOT '70s technology.  It has a 16-bit CPU
|> and an Ensoniq chip that was not even around in the 70s!

The 65816 had a "mode bit"; read Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New
Machine" for why that wasn't an elegant solution to the problem.

|> >|> and that Apple was right to end it. 

|> >They were.

|> No.  It was their biggest mistake.

All I can do is agree to disagree.  I own a //e, so I wore those
shoes.  The Apple II line was doomed, because there wasn't enough
volume to generate the revenue needed to engineer the next generation
of the chip.

[ snip ]

|> >I did an awful lot with a //e.  Boy was I proud when I counted up
|> >all the RAM chips, and realized that I nearly had half a megabyte.

|> But that's not the Apple II that people see as having had a future.
|> They saw the 4-8MB GS with the hard disk and a CPU the speed of a
|> Mac LC.

|> That's the Apple II system that many csa2 readers have.

Possibly, after they got done adding 14 MHz accelerators, etc...  But
they paid a lot more for the maxed-out IIGS than the Mac LC cost, and
got a lot less.  The best screen resolution was still 640x200.

|> >|> The Apple II line was more than that, but ever so much more so if
|> >|> you consider the Apple IIgs.

|> >But the IIGS was always underpowered compared to the competition.

|> No.  It had, out of the box, IBM PC/AT speed and a fabulous synthesizer
|> chip.  It was like an Amiga, but purposefully held back (it could have
|> been faster than the AT).

The problem was, it came out at least a year after the PC/AT, and only
six months before the Macintosh II.

[ snip ]

|> >Apple was the only customer for 65816s in any appreciable quantity.
|> >By the time the IIGS came around, 286s at 12 to 16 MHz were popular.
|> >The only places that were buying GSs were places that already had
|> >Apple IIs.  The II market wasn't growing at anywhere near the same
|> >rate as PCs.

|> Ah, those 12-16MHz '286 did not come out until later.  They were
|> expensive.  WDC had 6-8MHz '816 chips available by then which were
|> about the speed of 12-16MHz '286's.

You're fudging the time-line, and neglecting the lag from design
decision to market availability.  Six months after the introduction of
the IIGS (16-bit bus, 16-bit processor running at 2.7MHz), you could
get Mac II (32-bit bus, 32-bit processor running at 16 MHz).

|> >All of your engineering updates would have cost money, and Apple
|> >couldn't project enough sales to generate a return on the investment. 
|> >My other comments on Alpha vs. PPC RISC processors applied to the
|> >65c816 vs. 68000.  By the time the IIGS came out, Macintosh had taken
|> >flight.

|> That's not true.  The IIgs, in its first year, was outselling the Mac.

Which Mac?  Certainly not all of them...

|> Laser would have come out with IIgs clones.

Why didn't they?

Chris
-- 
Speaking only for myself, of course.
Chris Wood    christw@lexis-nexis.com   cats@CFAnet.com