[net.micro.apple] Apple Shafts America

cs4911ay@unm-cvax.UUCP (09/21/84)

[It is pitch black.  You are likely to be eaten by a -- ]

	> From: purdue!allegra!amd!phil (Phil Ngai)
	>
	>  ...
	>
	> That was the stupidest thing I've read all month.

	Aw, come on; I can think of three or four others that top mine
any day of the week.  :-)
	
	> Why don't you design your own fat mac and sell it for $1495.
	> Then everyone would love you. But I know you're not going to.
	> Must be because you're greedy.

	Who said anything about $1495?  All I'm asking for is $3000, a 
perfectly reasonable amount.  Especially when one considers that Apple
was selling Macs to dealers for $1650 when they first came out (the price
has, I believe, dropped since then), and I really don't think they were
losing money on that deal.
	
	> Do you know what they call a business that sells things for less
	> than they cost to make? BANKRUPT! Do you know how much 256K RAMs
	> go for? $40 each. Do you know how much it costs my company to
	> process a simple purchase order? > $50. Do you know what my company's
	> required return on investment is? 2 to 1.
	
	$30, since Apple is getting a discount for quantity.  And I certainly
don't expect any company to become a charity organization.  I do, however,
expect a certain amount of consideration for the people who supported the
company and made its new product a commercial success.  This, I think, is
nothing more than good public relations.

	> No one forced you to buy the Mac, so quit whining about how much it
	> costs. If price really mattered you'd wait til it came down like
	> calculators and IBM-PCs. Shut your face.

	If one waited forever, one would never buy anything.  Or what one
bought would be obsolete.  Agreed, no one forced me to buy my Mac, and I
am not whining about the price I paid for it.  My complaint is with the
surcharge Apple is forcing its customers to pay in order to make their
product as useful as it should have been to begin with.  It is perfectly
obvious that Apple knew that 128K was inadequate, since all their spec sheets
(as found in the $150 "Inside Macintosh" manual) refer to 512K Macs with
double-sided drives, and that they misled their customers into thinking
that the product they were buying was the real thing.  What they should
have done was, up-front, revealed this fact, charged their original 
customers a few hundred bucks more, and given them a coupon which would
entitle them to free upgrade upon release of the Fat Mac.  This, at least,
would have let the buyer know what he was getting into.
	Shut my face?  Gosh, and not even a :-).  I'm seriously hurt.

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						Mike Conley
						U.N.M., Albuquerque, NM
						ucbvax!unmvax!cvax:cs4911ay


	"Think of it as evolution in action."