info-mac@utcsrgv.UUCP (info-mac) (05/12/84)
Date: Thu 10 May 84 23:25:31-PDT From: Chad Leland Mitchell <uw-beaver!M.CHAD@SU-SIERRA.ARPA> Subject: price To: info-mac@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA 1-The categorization of people reading the BBoard is a real overgeneralizaton. For example, I am a certified developer. I am also a graduate student and cannot afford a Lisa. I have some things I am putting together with one other person. Since they would need to be coded in assembly anyway (the Mac is the slowest machine they could possibly run on) we will be using the assembler when it arrives. Meanwhile we are doing the product design. I have no other direct connection with Apple. I have friends who work there and at HP, IBM, etc. Some of my school research is paid for by IBM. And I have worked for Bell Labs. Almost three years ago I specified the personal computer which I would be willing to buy and which would be interesting for me to program. At the time there was nothing anywhere near the price range. The Lisa was impressive and if it had been cheaper or earlier would have been a hit. I know several people who bought IBM PC-XTs prior to January 24th who wish they had waited for the $5500 Lisa 2/10 (much cheaper than about $7000 for a "somewhat similarly equiped" PC XT). The Macintosh is very close in all respects including price to the dream machine that I specified. It is powerful enough to do interesting work and to make an attempt at enogh user friendliness to call it an appliance. I am looking forward to being able to program on top of an existing user interface which is not upward compatible with punched cards. I find it hard to believe that anyone could fall for the statement that if IBM had come out with this machine we would all be complaining. If IBM had come out with this machine, Apple would have lost totally. We would all be shocked at something so innovative (IBM does innovative research, but it is a real surprise when they come out with innovative products since they have a stated policy of letting other companies do their market research for them). Apple isn't perfect (and I admit that there may be people on this BBoard that seem to doubt it). The Mac has some flaws. SOME of the software is coming late. On the other hand, the software is no later than it has been for everything else I have ever dealt with, it is far more powerful and complex software than has been on personal computers before, and Second Quarter does not mean April; it means before June 30. I know of no other machine in the price range that comes close in almost any measure I care about. It is not a Dorado, nor a Lilth, but then it does not cost $100,000 nor even $10,000. Thus, you see, I am not a rich Lisa buyer, but I like the Mac a lot. It brings computing to my parents (who bought one), my brother (who bought one), my wife (who tells me we need two). None of them has ever written a program. All of them had access to IBM PCs and used them for word processing and accounting. None of them liked using the PC and they still had negative feelings toward computers in general. They each spent a few hours using a Macintosh and decided that they wanted one. They now feel confortable about computers. Computers are acceptable topics of conversation. My wife is planning to computerize her files, her recipes, our library, etc. She could have done that before on other machines, but she never felt the desire to and never really felt comfortable with a computer before, despite my prompting for several years. Macintosh does something which may seem terrible to some. It makes computing fun. I admit that to some it may have been fun before Macintosh (myself included), but then some people thought it was lots of fun to enter in long sequences of machine code using front panel switches. 2-I have been asked by a friend (Robert Gardner) to forward this to the BBoard: I have been trying to understand why some people are claiming the Macintosh is overpriced. A look through the What's New column of the most recent BYTE shows, for instance, the Zenith Z-100 PC compatible with 128K bytes RAM, 2 serial ports, graphics, and one DS/DD drive lists at $2800; the new PC portable (if you can call 30 pounds portable) with 256K RAM and 1 DS/DD drive (but minus everything else IBM PC's are famous for coming without) lists at $2800 also. These machines come only with system software, don't include a mouse or graphics in ROM, windowing, etc., and are bogged down by a barely adequate CPU. A look through the mail-order discount houses also shows the Mac is at least competitively priced. So, I wonder, the Mac is overpriced compared to what? It's more expensive than the Kaypro or the myriad of other 8-bit machines, but certainly a 16/32 bit machine can't compare in price with an 8-bit machine (unless we're comparing price/performance). I think the answer is that the Mac is overpriced compared to expectations, and perhaps Apple is guilty of raising false expectations (I guess Scully is to blame for shattering those expectations). Finally, while we all would certainly like to see the Mac cheaper (and everything else we purchase, too!), we need to remember that this country is built on the profit motive. According to Adam Smith, when demand exceeds supply prices remain high. Currently, Apple is able to sell more Macintoshes than it can build, so the price is justifyably high. Rumor has it that it costs Apple around $600 to build a Mac (I assume this includes parts and labor only), so we can surely expect the price to fall once their production facilities are able to keep up with demand. In the meantime, I don't think we can begrudge Apple their well-deserved profits. -------
info-mac@utcsrgv.UUCP (info-mac) (05/15/84)
Date: Mon 14 May 84 10:09:50-PDT From: Chad Leland Mitchell <uw-beaver!M.CHAD@SU-SIERRA.ARPA> Subject: price To: info-mac@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA Individually, a few of Jerry's points make some sense, but taken together I am not sure. For example: -Apple may be going for market share. I am sure that they are based on advertizing strategies, but we will not really know as long as they can sell every Mac they can make at the current price. If they drop the price as production catches up to sales THEN we will know they are going for market share. Until then we do not know. -To be useful by Jerry's definition, a Mac needs a second drive and a printer which does not bring the price to $4000. First he complained that the second drive was not available. Is he now complaining that it is available? -Jerry's main concern about software is that there is not enough software right now. I cannot understand how changing the certified developer program would help with that. If Apple approved everyone who applied from here on they would still contribute little software until soemtime next year. -If I see a BYTE article which says that there are only 7 or 9 (or however many there are right now) software packages currently available for the Mac, I hope it also reads "(as of May 7)" or something like that. The "Update" on the Macintosh and Lisa 2 in the current BYTE seems to have been written right after the January 24th meeting. With such a lag time, any claim to little software is likely to be very out of date. -I am not too worried that no software will arrive. I might be if it were all still in design or development phases, but much of it is in Beta test and very little that makes it to beta test does not really ship. -We all want the software to be well tested and really custimized to take advantage of the Mac. We complain about the MS-Basic which seems to be a quick port. We also want all of that software right now. I would rather wait till June for well tested software than get something now that works as well as some of the early software on some other machines. The ONLY editor that I am aware of for the IBM-PC when it was announced was EDLIN which as you might guess is a line editor. I do have a possible correction to make. Rumors still seem to indicate that in the early days of the Certified Developer program there was a 90% acceptance rate. When they reached about 1000 certified developers (far more than anticipated) they seem to have decided to change that acceptance rate significantly (this is just a rumor to me, but others seem to support this). Perhaps when their staff figures out how to support the volume of developers already accepted they will change the acceptance rate again. Thus I stand corrected. Back when they told me that anyone with the right qualifications would be accepted that was true, but it may no longer be true. Chad -------