bowdidge@cs.ucsd.edu (Robert Bowdidge) (10/31/90)
A few weeks ago, there was a kind soul who was going to collect the prices for NeXTs at various universities and post a comprehensive list. Did this get posted, and did I miss it? I'm interested in the list because I want to point out to our bookstore just how badly they're overpricing their machines. Perhaps with a list of prices, our local student paper would like to do some muckracking about how the bookstore's overcharging its captive audience. They've got quite a reputation around these parts for their pricing schemes. Obligatory Joke: I went into the U.C. San Diego Bookstore a couple weeks ago and asked about the new NeXTs. The person I talked to, one of the full time managers of the computer section, told me that they'd be carrying the new models and gave me a price list. Of course, they were planning on charging $3995 for a NextStation that U.C. Berkeley and UCLA were only charging ~3400 for. I asked him if there were any chance that the price would be lowered so it was more in line with the other UC schools. He then launched into a tirade saying that UCSD's prices were fair and that UCLA and UC Berkeley were able to sell their computers so cheap (600 dollars cheaper) because they were subsidizing computer sales with T-shirt sales. Well, I'm a Berkeley alum, and smart enough to know that Berkeley's computer sales are done by the University, not by the ASUC store. Ever since the student govt. refused to sell IBM's, the University hasn't let them sell Apples, IBMs, or NeXTs to the students; all sales go through the University, which charges whatever they're paying for the machines plus seven percent handling. (UCLA does sell their computers through the student-association run store, but their prices still tended to be only a bit below Berkeley's. The subsidy that the student government's giving is nowhere near 20% of the cost of the machine...) Of course, the guy kept insisting that Berkeley and LA were subsidizing their purchases with T-shirts, so I finally walked away in disguist. Of course, the punch line is that I met with a NeXT rep and asked him if he could do me a favor and knock some sense into the Bookstore managers' heads, and he told me that NeXT was actually unhappy with UCSD's pricing scheme -- they felt the high prices would keep people from buying them. Moral: If the computer manufacturer thinks you're charging too much, then you must really be doing something wrong... Looking forward to getting a master price list, -- Robert bowdidge@beowulf.ucsd.edu