toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) (03/01/90)
Reality vs. Apple Computer
by
Todd Whitesel
28-Feb-90
This paper was originally to be the preface to the third writing of
"The Apple //f: A Possible Future for the Apple //" but as it addresses
Apple's confusing signals to the world in general I felt it should be a
separate paper. With any luck Apple will realize that this is how they
actually look to the world outside and will do something about it.
* * *
After the thrill of a new computer fades and people actually use the
thing enough to run into problems, Apple is nowhere to be found. Authorized
Dealers are widely known to be the worst place to go for help, and some of
them are even misinformed about their own products. User groups and friends
at work or school end up being the best people to ask for help; this is
actually as it should be. Apple needs to recognize the widespread user
support that has from the beginning sold more of their computers than any
"computing experience."
Unfortunately, this user support is deteriorating and for the Apple //
it has long since reached critical, while Apple has effectively done nothing
to stop it. Apple // users are sick of seeing new programs come out for the
PC, Mac, and Amiga, with Apple versions late in coming, if ever. The software
industry is long since fed up with lack of real support from Apple, and has
largely abandoned the Apple //. Apple needs to start genuinely supporting the
Apple // before it endures the most painful death a product can experience,
with its industry bankrupt and its users betrayed and soured to the company
that led them on for years and then finally discontinued their machine.
To make matters worse, the PC and Amiga are looking more attractive all
the time. Windows on the PC is developing to the point where business users
will see few reasons to buy a relatively overpriced Macintosh. The Amiga has
been a slap in the face of the Apple IIGS hardware ever since both were
introduced. Apple needs to start providing genuine value at competitive
prices, with all of its products, and quit riding on the success of a
wonderful interface that is programming hell.
And while the more impatient // users are giving up and going Amiga,
Apple's Education Reps have been telling schools what they should buy. The
vast majority of grade school education is a finite problem which has for
years been solved by //e's and //c's running a vast library of excellent
education software. Educators have labs full of cheap Apple //'s running the
128K programs they are already familiar with, and if they need something more
powerful they end up buying PCs or Amigas for it. Many cannot afford the Macs
they would need and the programs they want to run (such as AutoCAD) have not
yet been ported to the IIGS, because of Apple's ineffectual support. Apple
needs to quit sending the signal to educators that they should pay more money
to do the same things and to respect customers' decisions about what they
want to buy.
Everyone wants Apple to bounce back from the shakeup. There are rumors
of great things in the labs at Cupertino. But while Apple sits back pondering
the most dramatic moment to announce a DMA SCSI card or Hypercard GS, the
market for these products shrinks daily as Apple's tight-lipped silence in
the face of MacWeek's doomsaying cause more and more people to abandon the
Apple // and to disown Apple Computer as well. Apple needs to tell the
outside world what is going on before it loses too many customers to
misinformation and the competition.
I say with conviction that non-disclosure is killing the Apple //. It
is a petty and paranoid policy that has prevented an industry from having
confidence in its own future. When John Sculley says "we have no intention of
abandoning the Apple II" it carries some but not much more weight than
John-Louis Gassee's "we will continue to sell the Apple II as long as our
customers wish to buy it," which didn't fool anyone; especially not those who
see Amigas and PCs getting better and cheaper every year while the IIGS
architecture remains that of a //e on steroids and the Apple //c+ gets no
marketing thrust when it is one of the best home computers ever produced.
Apple needs to take on the responsibility of making its own products worth
buying, and to do so in the eyes of a public that cares more about "what will
it do for me?" than "How many mega {hertz, bytes, pixels} ?"
Most low end customers want a computer they can use before they want
one they can brag to their friends about. Satisfying them doesn't take much,
as the PC and Amiga are showing, but it does require low cost and flexible
expansion options. If Apple wants to sell to the low end in all its
diversity, that task will require both the Apple // and the Macintosh. Apple
needs to officially abolish the misconception that its product lines cannot
coexist, and its dealers must be taught to be knowledgeable of and to sell
each for what it is best at doing.
The most simple example of this, for any fanatics who need convincing,
is also the most obvious. NTSC Video versus Square Pixels. The former is
widely used for games, animation, and overlay; the latter is unbeatable for
high-quality desktop publishing, CAD, and image analysis. It is not very cost
effective to design for both without lots of compromises. The real world is
never simple enough for any one design to work well for everything, and Apple
has the greatest product diversity of any manufacturer. It's time we saw that
as an advantage instead of a pointless holy war.
* * *
Ok, so we take on the world as a unified front behind Apple's Human
Interface and its mission to make computers that people can use. What to do
first?
0. Announce something before MacWeek does. Announce that the Apple //
has a future, and follow it up with some concrete evidence that people will
believe and that developers will stake their money on. Apple has the power to
excute a major comeback in the low end if somebody upstairs would realize
that there are lots of people who want a cheap computer they can use more
than they want an expensive one they can play with, and that Apple can and
has manufactured both.
1. Advertise the //c+ as the perfect AppleWorks machine that it is,
pull the price down so that it blows away the Laser, and then let it sell
like wildfire to those who want a computer but already have a desktop. Or
give them a choice: resurrect the double-hires "mini finder" and include it
free. Refine the //c+ into niche products whose markets are untapped, like a
diskless education workstation and a true portable that people can use to
take notes on in a quiet room.
2. Develop a REAL IIGS that will nuke the Amiga and get some innovation
back into Apple's products. Pre-announcing it wouldn't be such a bad idea,
actually; IIGS sales suck anyway and I doubt Apple would notice the loss once
the //c+ starts selling. Since the new machine would be IIGS compatible it
would rekindle interest from developers, but they will still need better
software support and this means fixing APW. Don't force Apple // developers
to buy Macintoshes if they can't afford them; they don't appreciate it and
neither do we when their programs turn out bad, expensive, or both, because
no one has invested the man-hours to produce a decent C compiler for the
65816.
3. Keep the low cost Macintosh development chugging along, and give it
a blitter as well. Color Macs for the masses will be a great thing. In the
future, make a blitter standard in every desktop based computer; if anyone
actually needs to be convinced of how easy and necessary this is, I suggest
you inspect an Amiga 500, which was available before the Mac Plus and can
still run rings around the graphics of any computer Apple makes that is even
close to its price range.
4. Simply accept responsibility for all that has happened and take
steps to prevent it from ever getting this bad again. Form a Customer
Feedback Division and include stable mail and Email addresses with every
Apple product. Then act on the flood of letters that will come in. This alone
is probably the single greatest thing that can be done to re-establish
Apple's credibility as a company that cares.
5. Burn all the 90 day warranty sheets and make a one year warranty
standard for every Apple product. There is no honest reason to delay doing
this.
6. Update every Apple product to make each competitive and valuable in
and of itself. The IIGS RGB monitor desperately needs this. People buy
Commodore 1084S's instead because they also take stereo and composite NTSC.
Lots of students use them to watch television from a VCR. They also cost $150
less, but the cheap picture tube is unusable for interlaced graphics.
However, monitors can be made to display interlace properly; ask DEC how
their VR241 works.
7. Quit playing phone tag with Bill Mensch. Until someone is interested
enough to invest some money, Mensch's very promising 65832 and 65032 will
remain wisps of vapor, and Apple reportedly hasn't given him one bit of
recognition since he licensed two second sources to produce 65816's. Follow
up: get WDC and ASIC technologies together (if they'll cooperate) to produce
a 65832 that can fit on a gate array. This will solve the floating point,
math, and segmented addressing problems that people have with the 65816, and
will do it for cheap, especially if Apple's clout is behind the project.
8. Keep A/UX on the right track. A full Unix with true multitasking and
a usable GUI that doesn't require the decadence of a NeXT will be a good
thing. The technology might then work its way into the Mac and GS operating
systems and that multiplies its benefit.
9. Above all, don't forget that Apple started in a garage with a
product that was ahead of its time. Innovation is the art of taking a
compromise and turning it to advantage, and we all want to see that make a
comeback. Loosen up, too; Apple doesn't need to be IBM to beat IBM.
* * *
Comments, questions, flames, etc. to the addresses below.
Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu (internet)
toddpw (America Online)
1-55 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91126 (US Snail)
This document may be distributed, posted, and made available for downloading
so long as it is preserved in its entirety.jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jeremy G. Mereness) (03/02/90)
I would like to concur on what Mr. Whitesel posted. I would also like to add that from a marketing point of view, Apple has nothing to lose by producing such a machine, and is in fact damaging itself by not producing the product! Keeping their designs in the lab and never letting them surface is R&D wasted. And the Apple // caters to a community that is attracted to the new, the clever, and the original. We will find a use for and support anything that appears for the Apple//, providing that it APPEARS! If Apple has a good thing going, then it will get sold and make money. Remember that the 16K Apple ][ sold like hot cakes and cost $2000!!! However, I don't agree that a low end mac should be pushed, especially one with color. The mac is a hard coded machine, and from working closely with it in a university environment, I have found to be a monotonous and unexciting machine unless it is equipped with a great deal of extra memory, storage, and support software. Besides, with Appleworks GS in front of me, I am convinced that there is nothing that a low-end Mac would do that the GS can't do already. An improved GS, like the hinted Rom-04, would cover all the ground the Mac held while adding color and all the other things the // is known for. And it would be more economical to boot. In my opinion, a low-end Mac is a contradiction in terms. Apple should push the Mac as a high-end workstation, sold in configurations of 8 megs standard and mega-pixel monitors. Marketing research shows that the only computer arena still expanding is the workstation market, and the Mac has a unique opportunity to go head-to-head with NeXT with a familiar interface co-running with UNIX. Which UNIX??? Not A/UX... Mach, the OSF standard. I have two of them as AFS Workstations 5 feet behind me, and configured correctly, Mach would run in a window upon the Mac desktop. In this scheme, low-end Macs are useful only as Appletalk clients. They simply are too cumbersome with system software to act stand-alone. Departments here aren't interested in Mac SE's... they want nothing less than //cx's. Mac-Pluses are going the way of the old PC's... stacked in warehouse closets! And a //gs with a HFS FST and a library for applications to write and read to and from popular mac applications would fill the gap completely. The Mac is not a personal computer. It became a workstation with the introduction of the Mac //. The //gs is a personal computer. And the longer Apple takes to accept this, the more money they will lose. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |Jeremy Mereness | Support | Ye Olde Disclaimer: | |jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu (internet) | Free | The above represent my| |a700jm7e@cmccvb (Vax... bitnet) | Software | opinions, alone. | |staff/student@Carnegie Mellon U. | | Ya Gotta Love It. | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) (03/02/90)
jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jeremy G. Mereness) writes: >I would like to concur on what Mr. Whitesel posted. I would also like >to add that from a marketing point of view, Apple has nothing to lose >by producing such a machine, and is in fact damaging itself by not >producing the product! Keeping their designs in the lab and never >letting them surface is R&D wasted. And the Apple // caters to a >community that is attracted to the new, the clever, and the original. >We will find a use for and support anything that appears for the >Apple//, providing that it APPEARS! This is the reaction I hoped I'd get. Now if we can just convince Apple to do something about it. >However, I don't agree that a low end mac should be pushed, especially >one with color. The mac is a hard coded machine, and from working >closely with it in a university environment, I have found to be a >monotonous and unexciting machine unless it is equipped with a great >deal of extra memory, storage, and support software. I know that. But if they can come out with a reasonable one, then it will make lots of people happy. And the machine would be able to do some things that the IIGS and //f would not (but not much I have any say in it). >Besides, with Appleworks GS in front of me, I am convinced that there >is nothing that a low-end Mac would do that the GS can't do already. >An improved GS, like the hinted Rom-04, would cover all the ground the >Mac held while adding color and all the other things the // is known >for. And it would be more economical to boot. Also true. But I am not about to tell Apple to drop the research. If they can pull it off then I say five stars. I don't think it will compete with the IIGS half as much as everyone fears. The IIGS is a more more distributed machine, with lots of light-to-average weight processors in it, all working together to do what the machine does. A //f would exemplify this even more than the Amiga and I am convinced that this philosophy of many specialized CPUs can produce a much more versatile machine for less. The Mac by design is CPU oriented; this is fine for CPU intensive tasks but most // users only do number crunching occasionally (if ever) so let us pay for faster math if we need it. Speeding up the CPU and adding the blitter and DMA coprocessor will take most people's concerns and turn them inside out. >In my opinion, a low-end Mac is a contradiction in terms. Apple should >push the Mac as a high-end workstation, sold in configurations of 8 >megs standard and mega-pixel monitors. Marketing research shows that >the only computer arena still expanding is the workstation market, and >the Mac has a unique opportunity to go head-to-head with NeXT with a >familiar interface co-running with UNIX. Which UNIX??? Not A/UX... Aw, A/UX ain't that bad now that they've had a chance to work on it, sorta like GS/OS. (Stupid joke: the A/UX project Tshirt says "A/UX ... Apple's best kept secret" what if it also said "..and built to stay that way" ?) >In this scheme, low-end Macs are useful only as Appletalk clients. >They simply are too cumbersome with system software to act >stand-alone. What do you do? Run microstation or adobe illustrator all the time? I have a friend who gets more use out of his SE (he broke down and bought an 020 accelerator though) than most people get out of their Mac II's! >Departments here aren't interested in Mac SE's... they want nothing >less than //cx's. Mac-Pluses are going the way of the old PC's... >stacked in warehouse closets! Not really, here at Caltech both make great terminals. >And a //gs with a HFS FST and a library for applications to write and >read to and from popular mac applications would fill the gap >completely. The Mac is not a personal computer. It became a >workstation with the introduction of the Mac //. The //gs is a >personal computer. And the longer Apple takes to accept this, the more >money they will lose. I guess I have to admit this. I don't hate the Mac, I just want Apple to quit pushing it places it doesn't want to go, while the // has been ready and waiting for years. (Though it probably would have gotten off to a lame start until this year... Maybe we should be thankful, we have a chance to leap frog everyone if we do it right. Apple can't be stupid enough not to realize what kind of a market a carefully designed and executed //f would bring.) Todd Whitesel toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu
sschneider@pro-exchange.cts.com (The RainForest BBS) (03/03/90)
In-Reply-To: message from jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu When the 16K Apple ][ sold for $2000 there weren't 16K Apple ][ clones (or non-Apple clone computers with 10 times as much to offer selling for 70% less) selling for $1000.... What Apple (the Corporation) is one day going to have to come to an understanding with is the "mystic" is long gone... computer users today expect SUPERB value for the buck and not just mediocre... I've used Apple computers for seven years now and I can tell anyone that really cares that I will never buy -anything- with the Apple logo on it again. The computer is overpriced; the warranty is ridiculous; the hardware add-ons are overpriced as is the limited offering of software. There is "shareware" available for other brands of computers that blows away "commercial"-ware for the Apple and the list goes on and on. Steve Flames are useless as I respond to them as I would a campfire in the wilderness... I p*ss on them +===========================================================================+ | UUCP: crash!pro-exchange!sschneider COMPU$ERVE : 75166,2544 | | ARPA: crash!pro-exchange!sschneider@nosc.mil GENIE : sschneider | | INET: sschneider@pro-exchange.cts.com APLINK.PE : <shrug> | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | The RainForest @ 305-434-4927 / PO Box 841422, Pembroke Pines, Fl, 33084 | +===========================================================================+