Cheap AT clones?

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3 total messages Started by grunau Sat, 25 Oct 1986 22:55

#8515

Author: grunau
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1986 22:55

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I was wondering if anybody had any advice on purchasing an obscure mail
order clone.  The most confusing thing is that the ads (such as on PC Week)
are full of such a bizarrely broad range of prices, that it is difficult
to decide what a "reasonable" price is!

I find that in the AT line, the "respectables" seem to be selling at about
$1500 (w/o monitor/card or hd dsk, of course), and the "obscures" at around
$1000.  At $1000, if you at $200 for a mono card and monitor, $560 for a
20M AT-style hard disk, $100 for multifunction card, you can get a total
system, including printer, for just over $2000!

So, one wonders, what is the catch?  Why not go out and order one of these
right away (there are several going for the $1200 range, and a few at the
$995 range)?

Basically, when you figure that even though IBM is marking their systems up
at an obscene percentage, the difference between $1000 and $4000 must be
more than just ... greed.  Does anybody have any experience/stories/advice
about going the obscure mail-order route?  What are people's feelings about
the risk of going for an unheard-of manufacturer at $995 for an AT?

Re: R&D

#8521

Author: Don Jackson
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1986 20:58

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The big difference for the price is the fact that IBM is footing the
bill for the Research and Development of the system while the clones
simply use existing technology. They can recover their investment at
a substantially lower price than IBM can.
-- 
Name:   Don Jackson
Mail:   Dept. Zoology, Univ. Toronto
        Toronto, Ontario, Canada    M5S 1A1
UUCP:   {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!jackson

Re: Cheap AT clones?

#8645

Author: corwin
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1986 13:18

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The "obscure" ATs that I've dealt with work great.  My advice is: buy one
from someone close by.  If you do have a problem (nothing is 100%), you
can at least beat on the door.  I know thats easy for me to say living
in the Bay Area.  But its ever so much nicer to drive to someones store
and get an immediate exchange than to box it up, send it off, wait who
knows how long, call a couple of times, wait some more, finally get
your hardware back.  Note that while my experiences are very positive,
consider the number of gates in one of these machines.  Infant mortality
is a factor, and out of 10 machines, 1 is almost garanteed to fail in a
couple of hours use.  It could be the one you just bought.
-corwin

...!hplabs!cdp!corwin

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