roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (10/20/90)
wwtaroli@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Bill Taroli) writes: > considering that they stole an ADB port, the right to have two internal > floppies, and the expansion slot (oh, does it have an external floppy > port?) it's no WONDER they could reduce the component count and then > optimize what was left. You sound like you think these were bad decisions. To me, it sounds like what Apple did was to figure out what features of an SE were rarely used and drop them, which is good engineering sense (didn't this idea get the whole RISC bandwagon rolling?). Somebody said that only 5% of SE expansion slots were ever used. I'm surprised it was that high. I don't think I've ever seen a Mac which made use of the external floppy port, and to my mind, the choice between spending $150 on a second internal floppy drive and $300 on an internal 40 meg hard disk is easy; you get the hard disk (even if it was $100 vs. $400 there is still no trouble deciding). > it boggles the mind why Apple decided to spend EXTRA money developing a > new machine to replace its low end lineup that offers less functionality > (missing parts) than the machines it replaced [...] I suppose the > marketing types did it again. Pure conjecture on my part, but I suspect that most of the changes between the SE and the Classic were engineering-driven to reduce the per-unit production cost. When you are churning out as many units as Apple did with the Plus and SE, and presumably will do with the Classic, the development costs get amortized away pretty quickly. Marketing probably came up with the name, however; no engineering type would have called it the Classic. How about the Mac++? What I never understood was why the SE cost so much more than the Plus; the delta functionality was much smaller than the delta price. Not to mention that from what I understood, it actually cost Apple *less* to build an SE than a Plus. That was a pure case of marketing at it's best. I can remember several discussions with people planning on buying low-end Macs in which I would explain that the Plus was a much better bang/buck machine (especially before the SE price drop at the same time as the FDHD was added). I would go over point-by-point the differences, and they would still buy the SE becuase they were convinced it was so much better than the Plus, even though they couldn't defend that decision in concrete terms. If somebody were to say to me "I'm buying an SE because I need to exchange floppys with PCs", or "I'm buying an SE because need an ethernet connection", that would have been a fine reason, but they never did, they just went for the "better" machine. One interesting point about the product announcements. There was a little blurb about how Apple would continue to sell SEs to those customers to whom they have contractual obligations. Guess what that means? Sometime around 4 months ago, I helped the New York City Department of Health write specs for a small network of Macs. I ended up picking an SE/30 file server (with 6 CD-ROM drives!) and two SEs off the Apple Government Price List (Why SEs if I think they are bad machines? Well, because within the total cost allowance I was given, I could get either two Pluses or two SEs, but not three Plusses. A bad reason, perhaps, but that's the reason). Anyway, 4 months later, and the order is still winding its way through the City red tape. My fear is that if I re-spec Classics instead of SEs at this point, while I can save a lot of money (or, get more machines for the same price) I'll also get put back to square one of the approval process, and they people who need the machines can't afford to wait another 4-6 months. And you wonder why NYC is in such trouble? -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "Arcane? Did you say arcane? It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"