🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <12101@reed.UUCP>, wab@reed.UUCP (Bill Baker) writes:
   
   [...]
   they've got us.  As the Mac line is constantly upgraded, we time and
   again face the choice of paying outrageous prices for new machines and
   upgrades or junking our Macs (the value of which decrease
   precipitously with every upgrade) and buying into another
   graphic-interface system, most of which are also proprietary and
   therefore overpriced.

AAIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!  no no no NO!

Every time Apple announces a new machine, and upgrade programs for older
machines, somebody posts an article like this (not to mention editorials
in magazines and so on), and I for one am getting god damned tired of it.

You are NEVER faced with the choice of "upgrade or die."  Your Mac never
suddenly becomes less valuable.  It still runs the same software, doesn't
it?  It still, in fact, does just as much or little as it always did.
Nobody comes around in black suits with white ties and violin cases saying,
"That's a Mac Plus, ain't it?  We'll just have to shoot you, then..."

If your machine does what you want it to, what's the problem?  If, on
the other hand, what's important is that your computer be the
biggest/fastest/whatever Macintosh that money can buy, then you have
to pay for it.  As far as Apple is concerned, you bought a machine.
Your choice.  If, later on, you want to buy another machine, you can,
but it will cost you.  If I go to trade in my car, I don't get what I
paid for it.  In a similar way, an older machine plus an upgrade will
cost more dollars than not buying one until now would have.

This is not because Apple is mean and money-hungry.  Think about it.

   I'm a professional in
   the industry and I'll pay top dollar for a state of the art machine,
   and thereby cover Apple's development costs and provide a hefty profit
   to Big Red.  But if Apple is going to keep reaming me for each logic
   board swap, forget it.

Oh, come on.  If you want to *stay* state of the art, you have to pay
as you go.  TANSTAAFL.  By definition, something is only new or state of
the art until something better comes along. 

  $2000 for essentially a 68030 and a PMMU?  If
   Motorola is charging you that much for chips, then I'm putting the
   money I would have spent on a Mac into Motorola stock.

So buy a 68030 and a PMMU and roll your own.  It's not just the <expletive
deleted> hardware cost that you're paying for.  There's a significant
amount of design investment in even an incremental improvement like the IIx,
if nothing else.

You might want to try taking an economics course at your local community
college and learn what resources are actually necessary to bring a
product to market, especially a volatile, high-volume one like this
industry.  The cost of materials is not much of a factor in the early
life of the product, which is all computers get, what with the way
technology is moving these days.

   [...] you won't guarantee your machines past 12 weeks?  I know the answer:
   buy AppleCare for the machine.  So I should pay for coverage you should be
   providing?

Computers don't break very often after an initial burn-in period.  I'd rather
pay for things that actually break rather than pay extra for my machine
(which is how you pay for your car warranty, to use your own analogy).

Why do people go crazy and demand things from vendors in this market that
they wouldn't even dream of asking any other kind of manufacturer?  Sigh.

Enough flaming for now :-).

-- 
Amanda Walker, InterCon Systems Corporation
amanda@lts.UUCP / ...!uunet!lts!amanda / 703.435.8170
--
C combines the flexibility of assembler with the power of assembler.