phd_ivo@gsbacd.uchicago.edu (04/12/89)
********************************************************************** For me, a machine is attractive if it is versatile. And I think the NeXt is. Potentially, it can be as user-friendly as a Mac and as powerful and easy to program as a workstation. I wonder how many people bought a Mac hoping to add Mac-features on top of their PC applications. As it turns out, however, many PC applications are not available on the Mac, nor is there good hope of porting (again: the Mac is just terribly difficult to program). NeXt with its UNIX base and tools does allow this porting reasonably easily. PCs are just limited by their history; DOS and 640K, the variety of hardware, drivers and software, etc. NeXt of course can help there, too. The fact that NeXt could potentially assume Mac/PC functions should not mean that it is forbidden to compete with workstations (incidentally, something that Macs and PCs tend to aspire to). I believe if it doesn't, there are enough 386 machines in the wings to do right that. Again, I wish NeXt had provided for better floating point performance, or would give us an idea whether one will eventually be able to upgrade... ********************** Our local MDC has just told me that NeXt has stopped shipping computers until the new system software is out (by the end of this month). Is the end of the month a good (or an optimistic) estimate of when one can get these machines? /ivo welch phd_ivo@gsbacd.uchicago.edu
declan@portia.Stanford.EDU (Declan McCullagh) (07/17/90)
In an earlier article, Barry Merriman writes... >But, even though the IIci is much cheaper, the best academic >discount model available here (UCLA) has only 4MB RAM and 80MB HD, >for $5200. So, you need to add 4MB RAM (about $300) and a 180 MB HD >($1200 at academic discount---thats the biggest drive they offer here) >to _approach_ the NeXT on memory capacity. This would bring the price >up to $6700. Then, add $150 for the keyboard and $1100 for a 2 page >display BW monitor (closest thing available here to the NeXT monitor) >and your up to $7950. Pretty steep, for what you get---which, again, >is primarily access to the Mac software base and GUI. Quite true. For that much, you could get a NeXT with at least the same size hard drive as the Mac AND an optical drive. And hey, don't forget a mouse for that IIci... >If anyone ever makes a MacII board for the Cube (probably legally >impossible?), I think Mac II* sales would vanish within a year. >(Or, the price would drop by about a factor of 2.) You overestimate the power of the marketplace to recognize a Good Thing. Permit me to amend your Mac II* sales prediction and say that if an emulator was perky enough (even IIci performance on an '040 cube would be fine), at least Mac IIfx sales would drop dramatically. And you're probably right - Apple would recognize that they might actually have some real competition for once and be forced to revise their price lists accordingly. Remember, there IS a Macintosh emulator for the Amiga, but it requires the user to obtain the Apple ROMs (it works with the 128K ones). As far as I know, that's all Apple can legally copyright; everything else used is off-the-shelf parts. So all an enterprising company must do is to clone certain parts of a Mac II motherboard and stick them on a NextBus card and allow users to pop in the ROMs. An approach that would be even more legal would be to get Mac IIci motherboards, fit a NextBus interface on them and drop them in the cube. $-) Or maybe we should just software-emulate a Mac instead? >Barry Merriman -Declan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Olympic Technologies / Registered NeXT Developers \ declan@portia.stanford.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------