shull@WHARTON-10.ARPA ("CHRISTOPHER E. SHULL") (08/23/86)
The sub-moronic "consultants" at the Penn Computer Store refuse to sell me either an Apple LaserWriter Plus or an upgrade kit for our LaserWriter. They claim that there are problems with the Plus's reliability, and even suggested that the failure rate is as high as fifty percent. Naturally, they are unwilling to sell, service or support a product with such an awful track record. If this is true, I don't blame them. However, I would not be the least bit surprised if they were just too lazy to deal with new products. I talked to some folks at local Authorized Apple Repair Centers and they hadn't had any problems, but suggested that they hadn't sold many Pluses either. I recall that there was a message on Laser-Lovers stating that demand was so high that Apple couldn't build them fast enough. Last time I asked this question I got a great response, so I'll use it again, "What's the real story?" -Chris Christopher E. Shull Decision Sciences Department The Wharton School Shull@Wharton-10.ARPA University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6366 (215) 898-5930 ------
RCKing@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA ("Roger C. King") (08/23/86)
Yes, based on my experiences. Recently my LaserWriter was upgraded to a LaserWriter Plus by a local dealer. Mine was one of the older vintage which requires a jumper to be soldered in addition to the ROM's being replaced. All was well for a few days until one morning the test page did not come forth as expected at turn on time. Since then, I usually must power the unit on and off several times in the morning in order to get a successful boot. Otherwise, no test page, and the green light blinks on the side near the RS232 connector indicating servicing needed and the LaserWriter Plus remains innert. Before the upgrade took place, I had to wait at least 6 months to get it because, according to the local dealer, apple was having problems producing the upgrades. At the time I thought that this was due to demand. Now the dealer tells me that a large, perhaps as large as 90%, of upgrades are either DOA or dead on manufacture (I am unclear as to which). I don't know what to make of my dealer's remarks, he could be trying to cover up a problem of his own, but I do believe the local dealer when he says he has had a number of cases exactly like mine. We are a big customer and he has no interest in not correcting my problem if he could. At this point the local dealer indicates that he has no upgrade kits and cannot get them very quickly from Apple. I don't know exactly what the LaserWriter Plus problem is, but I do know that I have a problem which an otherwise reputable dealer is having a hard time coming to grips with. Can anyone else shed light on this? By the way, once I do 'warm up' the LaserWriter Plus and get a test page out things seem to work properly. But I fully expect that some morning it is not going to work properly at all. Also, I know of at least a half dozen LaserWriter Plus's here that work correctly, so far, inlcluding at least one like mine of older vintage. It could be that Apple is having production problems, and my upgrade didn't happen to show up as bad in their plant burn-in. If that is the case my dealers remarks would indicate that other bad apples are probably making it through burn-in. Roger King MIT Lincoln Laboratory
reid@DECWRL.DEC.COM (Brian Reid) (08/24/86)
We had several LaserWriters upgraded into LaserWriter Pluses. It didn't work terribly well. One of them now hangs reasonably often, and another one died completely. The one that died completely was taken in to our Apple dealer for servicing, and after about a month of frustration, he removed the upgrade and converted it back into an original LaserWriter; he was not able to make it work any other way. I know several other people who have had to have LaserWriter Plus upgrade kits removed in order to get the machines working again. In every case the failure mode is that the machine just does nothing when you turn it on: no poweron page, no nothing. I have therefore decided not to upgrade my own personal LaserWriter; I can't afford to have it stop working. On the other hand, I do not know of any factory-original LaserWriter Plus machines that have problems. The whole difficulty seems to be in the field upgrades (2 out of 3 upgrades to our machines have caused problems). Brian Reid
Mly.G.Pogo%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU ("Bob Soron") (08/24/86)
After Jean-Louis Gassee's talk at the MacWorld Expo in Boston, he fielded a few questions; when someone stood and asked, "When are reliable LaserWriter upgrades going to make it to the dealers," there was a fair amount of applause from the audience, so it's safe to say there _are_ problems. Another Apple manager who was on the dais said that they had underanticipated demand considerably and had had production problems simultaneously; the production problems were cleared up but demand would keep an artificial shortage real for another month or two. -------
RCKing@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA ("Roger C. King") (08/24/86)
I am told by my dealer that there is no such thing as a factory fresh LaserWriter Plus. Rather, all LaserWriter Plus's he delivers to us are shipped to him as LaserWriters, then upgraded by him with field kits and burned in. I do not know if this is universally true. Roger King MIT Lincoln Laboratory
wellsm@pogo.tek.CSNET (Wells Matthews) (08/25/86)
My engineering group has purchased two Apple LaserWriter Pluses in the last 6 months; one about 6 months ago and one about 4 months ago. At that time our dealer informed us the the lead time on Pluses was several months, and was on a quota system from Apple. As has been stated recently in this newsgroup, it is our understanding that Pluses are shipped as regular LaserWriters with an upgrade kit. This upgrade kit consists of a new set of mask roms, with PostScript 2.0 and the additional rom-resident fonts. Fortunately for us, our local dealer accepted our order for the pluses on the condition we would have regular LaserWriters delivered to us at the time of the order and the upgrades would be delivered as they became available. The upgrades arrived about 4 months after the orginal purchase 6 months ago. We did the upgrades ourselves, NOT the dealer, and had no problems. As has been mentioned, older LaserWriters required some soldering to be done as part of the upgrade. However, since ours were fairly new, this was not required, the whole upgrade consisted of taking out the LaserWriter mask roms and inserting the LaserWriter Plus mask roms. After reading recent net postings on this topic I wonder if we were lucky. Both our upgrades went fine with no problems, to date we have had no problems with either LaserWriter Plus. Note: at some point Apple started shipping the regular LaserWriter with PostScript 2.0. Our newer one, had 2.0 while the 2 month old older one had PostScript 1.0. It is our understanding that PostScript 2.0 is marginally faster with text and does some overlapping processing: printing page n while building part of the bitmap for page n+1. We, did not, however, do any performance testing between 1.0 and 2.0. Wells I. Matthews
cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) (08/26/86)
> The sub-moronic "consultants" at the Penn Computer Store refuse to sell > me either an Apple LaserWriter Plus or an upgrade kit for our LaserWriter. > > They claim that there are problems with the Plus's reliability, and even > suggested that the failure rate is as high as fifty percent. Naturally, > they are unwilling to sell, service or support a product with such an > awful track record. If this is true, I don't blame them. However, I would > not be the least bit surprised if they were just too lazy to deal with new > products. > They may be telling the truth. A friend of mine is doing a project with LaserWriters. His LaserWriter was upgraded to a Plus without problems, but another LaserWriter that was upgraded to a Plus fails to come up and print the test page about 50% of the time. (The Authorized Repair Center that did the upgrade first quoted 3 days, then after they started work said it would be 7 days, and finally returned it after 2 weeks, admitting that it didn't work the first couple of times they did the upgrade.) > I recall that there was a message on Laser-Lovers stating that demand was so > high that Apple couldn't build them fast enough. > I'm not even sure that the Plus is available directly. I ordered a LaserWriter several weeks ago, and I asked how much more the Plus was. I was quoted a price for the upgrade -- there was no way my dealer could get me a factory Plus. Clayton E. Cramer
harrison@RENOIR (Michael Harrison) (08/26/86)
We have had several laser writers upgraded in the field by the Scholar's workstation group on the UC campus at a cost of about $45 each. In every case, the upgraded printer has worked perfectly with no problems or downtime.
oden@RSCH.WISC.EDU (Gregg Oden) (08/27/86)
We were upgraded for two days but had to revert back to non-Plus because of a problem in Special (Diabo-emulation) mode: when sent a continuous stream of lines (no form feeds), the printed image drifted higher and higher (and off the top of the paper) on successive pages. Also, lines were lost between pages. This happened on all Pluses we tested here. Anyone else know about this? ZZ