SHBOUM@MACALSTR.EDU (04/14/91)
Well I'm sitting here reading through Mac Weekly and now I see where
that $400 million in R&D that Apple is spending on is going...
3 new notebook macs, 2 68040's, and one Mac Classic/30 are in the
works at Apple Co. And all are to be released later this year! {including the
three new printers, and some new scanners coming up}. And they can't even
make one measly IIGS upgrade to give it some decent speed. I thought Scully
made a big deal when he came into power about keeping product lines down to
reduce production costs...
Anyways, they have some other stuff in here too. Apple's IIfx is
having problems with the speed it offers because of the hardware mods that
Apple did to it that it thought was necessary for the higher speed. Some of
the biggest problem is the I/O co-processors that Apple installed because
software accesses the ports directly, and guess what happens when the data
comes in twice as fast as it should? The end result is that the IIci with a
faster processor is better at both disk access and raw computing power - and
its Nubus slots are even faster too! I quote 'If an application is both
processor and disk intensive, a Iici with an accellerator would be the best
of both worlds' Well gee, I don't want to run a program that uses my
processor intensivly. These mac guys are something else...
Lets see here, what else is in here... Oh. They had an aritcle about
how comapnies were not buying the classic, and opting to go for the IIsi. Well
no kidding!!! The Classic is an underpowered mac wanna be. No business in
their right mind would want to buy that when they could get a faster machine
for a little more money. They said that it was doing better in the home
market. Duh....
Apple's "32 bit machine" really isn't 32 bit... Even under 32 bit
clean mode {upcoming in 7.0} because most applications aren't, so when you
try to run something that isn't, your mac does what it does best - crash!
So so much for a real 32 bit machine! They made some other comment that I'm
kinda confused about, and thats they said that under 24 bit addressing mode,
the mac can only access 8 megs of ram and another 6 by virtual ram. is this
true??? I don't think so, but I'm not sure...
Then in another article, they annouced that Apple has started shipping
the IIe emulator card for the Mac LC and how this was going to help ease the
transition in the schools from the IIs to a better machine - the mac... ug...
The only good thing that I saw was about the division of the comapany
and the II was placed in the consumer division where they'd develop low-cost
high volume products. Could be a good sign, could be a bad one. Who knows...
- Hal
| Hal Bouma | Send mail to: SHBoum@Macalstr.edu
| Macalester College | and SHBoum@Macalstr.Bitnet
| GEnie: H.Bouma | ".Sig Under Construction..."