tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) (10/09/88)
In article <815@etive.ed.ac.uk>, nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) writes: > I have this recurring nightmare. [...] I keep having this horrible > fear of an announcement by Apple: > "We are committed to memory management on Macintoshes. The new > System n.0 will run on a 68020-based machine only. In line with our > past upgrade policies, we will sell 68020 boards to SE owners for > $not-much. We consider the 68000-based Mac to be obsolete. The minimal > Macintosh is a 68020-based one. The Mac Plus is a bad dream. We will > not support it. Future software will not run on it." > Mummy, mummy, make the bad dream go away.... :-) I don't think so, though of course the Plus will be obsolete eventually. There are a *lot* of Pluses out there, not to mention 128s and 512s upgraded to Pluses. Apple *cannot afford* to forget about those customers; even if they wanted to, software vendors would not let them ("what do you mean, you're taking away 2/3rds of our market?") Now, at some point in the future Pluses will constitute a small enough percentage of the installed base of Macs that the loss of that market will be acceptable to software vendors, and *then* Apple will pull the plug. (Even then, some vendors will continue to support the old machines.) I think that that point is four or five years away, even if Apple stops making Pluses tomorrow. Yes, you say, but they pulled the plug on 128s and 512s after only a couple of years; couldn't they do the same to Pluses? I think that situation was different: first, the 128 was widely acknowledged to be an underpowered machine even when it came out, and so it was hard for software authors to fit reasonable applications on it; second, Apple was able to provide reasonable upgrade paths to Plus-equivalent hardware. (Whether they could/should have charged less than they did for the upgrades is a separate issue, which I don't want to argue here.) Thus, the only plausible scenario for dropping support would be that Apple announces an Official 68020 Upgrade for Plus owners (lots of third party manufacturers make one, so could Apple). After a year or two, enough people might have upgraded to allow Apple to drop support for the old configuration. We are seeing a comparable situation now with regard to memory; if it weren't for the artificially-induced shortage of memory chips, 2MB might already be considered the minimal configuration. (I'd bet lunch that Apple released Multifinder in expectation of widespread memory upgrades, and their schedule has been thrown off by the chip drought.) Bear in mind that Apple is strictly a hardware company now that they've spun off Claris. Once you have your Mac, the only way they make more money off you is to sell you a hardware upgrade. Dropping support for an old configuration is an effective way to persuade people to buy upgrades, and thus makes some sense for them; dropping support with no upgrade path only makes enemies. Thus, my prediction is that there will be an upgrade path for Pluses, and when enough of the user base has switched over, Apple will drop Plus support in order to encourage the rest of us to switch. (Now that I think about it, it's surprising that Apple has let Dove and friends have that business to themselves for so long.) -- tom lane Internet: tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu UUCP: <your favorite internet/arpanet gateway>!zog.cs.cmu.edu!tgl BITNET: tgl%zog.cs.cmu.edu@cmuccvma