Re: holy grail of apple computing?

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Sean Fahey wrote:

<snip>

> Aside from Apple's waning support for the Apple II and their Mac-centric
> vision, I think another reason MT didn't make it is because Apple could make
> more money selling you a HS SCSI card and other accessories for their
> established user base rather than eating margin on a new machine with SCSI
> and other cool gadgets integrated in it. There was no sales/profit stimulus
> to release it. The MT was too little, to late. There was no CPU speed
> increase, so you still had to buy an accelerator. No new graphics modes. And
> by current standards, you'd still need more RAM than what the stock MT
> offered. If they would have bundled the Apple II Ethernet card with it
> standard, it might have made more sense.

And the biggest issue of all is that it was a waning platform, with
little growth in the user base and (of course) software suppliers
heading for bigger money elsewhere.

A platform must be very strong in the marketplace to sustain an
"enhancement" cycle.  Such a cycle requires most of the user base
to upgrade to create a market for software that actually uses the
upgraded features, which makes them worth having--Catch 22.

I'm not talking about simply integrating a capability already
widely available as an add-on, but about adding, for example,
a new graphics mode.

One of the worst things a "platform" supplier can do is upgrade
and simultaneously obsolete a raft of add-ons for the previous
version, killing the add-on market.  To do this in its "waning"
years is a double whammy.  The later versions of Appleworks
come to mind...

-michael

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Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/