🚀 go-pugleaf

Apple averages about >1.5 machines/yr: Mac(84), Mac512K, Mac512KE,
Mac+, MacSE, MacII .  At present, Apple sells three machines.  If we
assume Apple marketing doesn't want to hassle with more than 2-3 Macs
for sale at a time, then in 2.5 years the MacII will be the
bottom-of-the-line macintosh, and lesser machines will be
discontinued.  The MacII is Apple's only gun against 80386 clones,
which will dominate by then.

Face it, the 68020 is the wave of the future.  The 68000 is a crufty
processor with some primitive, inefficient, broken microcode
(remember, it was supposed to page but there were bugs..)  I'll bet
the MacSE is the LAST Apple machine to ever use the 68000.  The next
"low end Mac" will probably have at least a 12Mhz 68020 in it.  12Mhz
68020s will probably drop below $100 in bulk if they aren't there
already.  So don't worry about the 68020 CPU.

At University Consortium prices, you can get a MacII monochrome
2-floppy (buy 3rd-party floppy) system for $3207.  That's only $1400
more than an SE.  For the money you get 4-bit grey-scale, a picture
twice the size, a 16Mhz 68020 (2.6 speedup), 68881 floating point,
stereo sound and an open architecture.  I believe the graphics speedup
exceeds 2.6 (BitBlt-type operations are outrageously fast), because
the 256K ROMs exploit the 68020 barrel shifter.  Name a 3rd-party
upgrade for ANY mac that comes anywhere near this price/performance
level.

As far as software compatibility: What do you think professional
developers will use to write programs?  Mac IIs.  To write software
to specifically exploit SEs would be cross-development, a royal pain.

Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois