🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Apr.11.01.01.35.1989.22877@topaz.rutgers.edu> witting@topaz.rutgers.edu (Paul K Willing) writes:
>
>THE IDEA:  Take a Mac IIcx box, pull out the 68030, the MMU, the math
>co-processor, and any other expensive bits that aren't required.  Drop
>in the standard 6800 and a regular Floppy drive.  Actually, Apple may
>prefer to do a complete board revision to prevent quick and dirty
>upgrades, but you get the picture.  We could call it a Mac IIv (for
>value or some such nonsense).
>
>THE RESULT:  A low cost (chuckle, ok, less expensive) expandable Mac.
>Idealy this sucker would sell for about what an SE does (maybe a
>little less and put it head to head with the SE).  It would lower the
>entry level for color/greyscale Mac's, increase the market size for
>Mac II series expansion cards, and maybe help lower Mac IIcx
>production costs through higher volumes (esp if the board remained
>common)  
>
>paul
witting@topaz.rutgers.edu

The only thing that ocurrs to me about this is that the current Mac II's have
trouble keeping up with all of the processing necessary for 8-bit color.  It
takes lots of RAM and processing power just to keep this system barely afloat
many times.  I don't think that it's possible to get the power necessary for
this task out of a 68000.  People are hungry for more power and despite the
cost advantage, I think that people are going to buy more rather than less
powerful Macs, especially as the OS requires it.  People will still buy 68000
based Macs for a while just as people bought 8088 and 8086 based PCs for a
while after the AT was introduced.  Actually, they bought them for years because
there was no reason to change.  But the Mac market moves faster, and a powerful
processor will be more and more necessary in the near future.  I don't think
that Apple will want to introduce a crippled machine and be blamer years down
the road for doing just that when they knew it was going to be obsolete in a
very short period of time.  Beside that, by the time they got it out, I don't
think *anybody* would want it.  It would be a bad marketing move all the way
around.

Nice idea though.

-Ace
University of the National Champion Wolverines