jm7e+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Jeremy G. Mereness") (09/08/88)
Could somebody forward this to AppleLink for me? Doug Gwyn writes... > Despite lots of reassurances about how Apple is >putting as much development into the Apple II family as into the >Mac, there sure isn't a lot of evidence for that. Almost every >interesting new Apple peripheral is supported for the Mac for a >year or more before the Apple II receives support (if ever). It is hard for me to understand why a company would neglect and frustrate a populace as devoted and dedicated as the users of the Apple //. No other machine has as much support as this one, and no other support group has been frustrated as much as ours, but we have perservered with faith in the Apple Computer Co. that was envisioned by two entrepreneurs in a garage. The people who now run Apple, however, obviously do not value such support. They are interested only in the short-term gains of bulk sales to schools and businesses; not the long-term insurance of happy, satisfied, and supported customers. A GS+ dream-machine is well within the capability of Apple, financially and productively. The bottom line is, they don't care. Nope, I cannot understand it. Maybe an MBA would teach me otherwise... but I doubt it. >I don't know why Apple seems to think the Apple II line could >be a competitive threat for the Mac. It can't and won't. There is no basis for this argument. The Mac is a workstation. The Mac+ and SE are merely crippled workstations w/o sufficient memory or storage. They have never been personal computers, with open-architecture and user programmability and unchanging hardware standards like the //. If Apple really wants to compete with Big Blue, they should beef up Macs to compete with Suns, Apollo's, MicroVaxes, and IBM PS/2's with RT cards running multitasking, UNIX-based, filesharing network environments. The // should be the die-hard PC in Apple's line. Am I angry about this? You bet I am! Capt. Albatross jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu ============ This was a Flame I guess. Great... I am mad and I don't know what to do about it. Apparently hoping in vain for a GS+... (*sigh*) disclaimer: These opinions are mine and will remain so until more intelligent or insightful or informed people are kind enough to show me the error of my ways because in the barbecue of life, a mind is a terrible thing to baste.
gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (09/08/88)
In article <YX9Tofy00V4E87iVU=@andrew.cmu.edu> jm7e+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Jeremy G. Mereness") writes: >They are interested only in the short-term gains of bulk sales to schools and >businesses; not the long-term insurance of happy, satisfied, and supported >customers. As you may have read some time ago in Open-Apple, when A+ surveyed their readership they found the median Apple II user age to be in the 40s, with most use for "personal business" applications. That didn't seem to slow at all the trend among Apple management to push the Apple II as being primarily for the "educational" market and the Mac as being for the "business" market. (In some sense the latter might be right, but the former is a serious misperception.) >The Mac+ and SE are merely crippled workstations w/o sufficient >memory or storage. They have never been personal computers, ... Interestingly, these Macs are quite popular in "higher education". >If Apple really wants to compete with Big Blue, they should beef >up Macs to compete with Suns, Apollo's, MicroVaxes, and IBM PS/2's with RT >cards running multitasking, UNIX-based, filesharing network environments. One assumes that's why they're trying to do with the Mac II. I agree that an Apple II makes a good personal computer, but the IBM PC clones seem to be dominating that market now. No surprise, though, given Apple's marketing strategies.