ravi@eneevax.UUCP (Ravi Kulkarni) (01/17/85)
Now that we have a fairly good idea of the features and price of the new 68000 atari machines, we can compare them and see if it will put some price pressure on the mac. The basic mac has a 512x342 bitmapped display,internal disk drive and 128k plus a mouse and a couple of high speed serial ports and an applebus local network interface. The lowest advertised price I have seen is about $1400 for this basic configuration. There are also rumors that apple may drop this by another few hundred dollars so we can assume that the price will be around $1200 by the time atari ships it's machines. The 512k upgrade is about $1000. The equivalent atari configuration would be the basic machine + mouse for $500 plus $200 for a disk drive and another $150 for a high res monochrome monitor, for a total of $850. The atari has a little higher resolution 640x400. I am assuming the most common configuration is with a monochrome monitor. So the mac will be about $350 more than a similarly configured atari. This is not such a huge difference and probably won't force apple to lower it's price as it can claim a "large" software base and a machine that is of professional quality with support vs atari's marketing it to zero support people like kmart and toys r us. However, the 512k upgrade will probably be much cheaper since atari's is only $200 more than the base machine. Whether apple could maintain this position depends solely on the quality or percieved quality of atari's machine. A repeat of commodore's problem with the c64 would probably spell disaster. If atari can grab a reasonable market share I think they can only get better since they have a few additional features such as color, a fast hard disk interface with dma, no wait state memory at 8Mhz vs the equivalent 4Mhz for apple because of display refreshing, 3 voice synthesizer that will eventually be upgraded to 16 independent voices and a midi interface. Of course apple won't be sitting idly by, but it should make for an interesting year with commodore jumping into the fray with their amiga machine later in the year. Atari has another machine in the works using the (rumored) 32032 that would bring the equivalent of a sun workstation to the home. If that really happened the entire micro market would be thrown into confusion. -- ARPA: eneevax!ravi@maryland UUCP: [seismo,allegra]!umcp-cs!eneevax!ravi
chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuqui Q. Koala) (01/20/85)
>Atari has another machine in the >works using the (rumored) 32032 that would bring the equivalent >of a sun workstation to the home. If that really happened >the entire micro market would be thrown into confusion. the 32032 is not rumoured. I have touched them, held them, played with them and used them here at National. Whether or not Atari is using them is still a rumour, of course, but the chip exists. chuq (*how's that for now saying anything?*) -- From the ministry of silly talks: Chuq Von Rospach {allegra,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA National Semiconductor does not require useless disclaimers on posted material that is obviously not posted by company spokesmen...