Steve Heckler (04/10/91)
Apple, in recent days, has made a tremendous number of steps in the right direction. Prices on their computers have come down, and the two new printers are good deals for the money. There is one area, however, in which Apple has not made a major price move: Upgrade Boards. There are thousands of Macintosh SE owners out there who would like to upgrade their tired machines to the power of the SE/30, but simply don't have the money to spend on buying a new machine, especially with the prices on their own machines being dramatically undercut by those of the new Classic. As a result of the high price of a true upgrade, they have had to settle for the only average capabilities of low-end accelerator boards, which sometimes do not accomodate a 68882 floating point coprocessor, rarely allow for the addition of RAM beyond the SE's 4 meg limit, lack a 68851 Paged Memory chip, and will not accomodate virtual memory under System 7.0 Currently, an upgrade board from the SE to SE/30 runs $1199 at through Apple's discount plan for universities, and undoubtedly hundreds of dollars higher through mail order or dealers. What Apple should do: Dramatically slash prices on the upgrade from the SE to the SE/30. Make the board compatible only with the SE, which is now out of production (thus eliminating Apple's fears of people buying a new SE and adding the board for about the same price as buying an SE/30). With the thousands of SE owners who want to upgrade, I think an Upgrade board with several dollars slashed off the price would sell in huge quantities, and would be a success similar to the Classic and StyleWriter. I don't konw the situation with upgrades from other systems, but I suspect a cheaper upgrade board from the II and IIx to the IIfx would also sell very well, since many universities and some private groups purchased large numbers of these machines. I'd like to hear from Apple and anyone else who has an opinion on the matter. Please write to me at sheckler@leland.stanford.edu or post on the board. I will post a summary of mail I receive in a few days. Steve Heckler sheckler@leland.stanford.edu