chari@nueces.cactus.org (Chris Whatley) (01/22/90)
jiro@heights.cit.cornell.edu writes: > My mouse and keyboard had been feeling unwell lately (too much >hacking on Cassandra) and I went to my local NeXT rep. at Cornell >to see how much it would cost to get them replaced: > Keyboard: $303.25 > Mouse: $135 > Phew.... NeXT is making a hefty chunk with those.... Now I see >why a one year service contract is $800... (By the way, all these >prices are academic prices, multiply by a suitable fudge factor >for Businessland (try 150%)). Pardon my french but... You have got to be shitting me!!!!! $800.00 a year. That is ridiculous. I had to sell my damn car to buy this machine. Do they really think a student can afford to buy this thing AND pay $800 a year for service? (somebody actually told me $900 a month ago but I though they were joking) And you better get it anyway! I just took my poor NeXT in to have optical drive #4 installed. Luckily NeXT is still extending its warranties indefinitely since I would have had to pay another $1300.00 for this. I don't know about you other NeXT owners but, I think this is pretty ridiculous and I'm really worried about the kind of expense I will incur in the future because of hardware failures. I suspect that much of the problem is dust. Shouldn't NeXT have mentioned this and instructed its customers on proper usage in a proper environment? (maybe even how to clean it also) Also, you could say that I put the drive to work extensively. I have it mounted as a partition for holding NetNews, Sources and /NextLibrary. Since I get a full feed it is frequently chunking away. Is it wearing out? I know the disks are holding up fine I have only had to go in and fix two uncorrectable locations in the past year on my collection of eight disks. If anyone from NeXT happens to be reading this, how about commenting on these issues: 1) What is the deal on these drives? Three bad drives in 1 year? Is this common or do I just need to change my air filter daily? (This looks like about 900 hours between failures. Lovely) 2) Has there been a new version of this drive released recently? The new one sounds different. 3) What is the justification for the cost of the service contract? 4) Is there a fix for the fans which reportedly blow the wrong way. 5) Could NeXT consider offering a component by component service contract? Would that be practical? -- Chris Whatley Work: chari@pelican.ma.utexas.edu (NeXT Mail) (512/471-7711 ext 123) Play: chari@nueces.cactus.org (NeXT Mail) (512/499-0475) Also: chari@emx.utexas.edu
rbp@investor.pgh.pa.us (Bob Peirce #305) (01/24/90)
In article <1990Jan22.005053.3955@nueces.cactus.org> chari@nueces.cactus.org (Chris Whatley) writes: >jiro@heights.cit.cornell.edu writes: >> >> Phew.... NeXT is making a hefty chunk with those.... Now I see >>why a one year service contract is $800... (By the way, all these > >Pardon my french but... You have got to be shitting me!!!!! $800.00 a >year. That is ridiculous. I had to sell my damn car to buy this Perhaps outrageous but fairly standard. Running a business I have to keep my computers on maintenance and the cost always seems to be about 8-12% of retail/year. -- Bob Peirce, Pittsburgh, PA 412-471-5320 ...!uunet!pitt!investor!rbp rbp@investor.pgh.pa.us