🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <905@cbdkc1.UUCP> gwe@cbdkc1.UUCP ( George Erhart  ) writes:
>RUMOR?
>
>Apple gave a forced vacation to employees at their Mac plant. The idea
>is to slow down production to avoid dropping the price. If this is true,
>what ever happened to the idea of a computer for the rest of us?

Actually, Apple gave a one week shutdown to ALL of their manufacturing
operations, not just the Mac group. It isn't a matter of trying to keep the
price up, it is a matter of trying to keep inventory down-- sales of all
computers have slipped significantly and building more computers than you
can sell means you end up borrowing money to build something you then have
to pay storage and interest costs for-- this means that the unit cost goes
up. Lowering the price only works if you can talk people into buying at the
lower price, and if you have enough leeway in your costs to still make some
money at the lower price, and if you can afford to keep the price at the
new lower price permanently. Also, since Apple did some price reductions in
january, it isn't usually a good marketing tactic to do more price
reductions in March....

People will probably disagree with me, but I dont think the Mac is
particularly overpriced-- there is a LOT of software development cost that
needs to be paid off in there...

>I also heard that apple will introduce a Mac with 128K of ROM and 
>double sided 800K floppies. The new ROM is suppose to have all? of the
>finder in it.

I've heard this too... I doubt that the new ROM's will have all of the
finder, but the rest of the toolbox should end up in ROM somewhere and that
should cut the size of the System file significantly.

chuq
-- 
Chuq Von Rospach, National Semiconductor
{cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui   nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA

Be seeing you!