What is an AIO Wove?

1.  The external 3 1/2 " drive for Macintosh will be available for sale at all dealers next week.  The Sony drives are extremely reliable, and failure rates are very low.

2.Currently there are 9 applications out for Macintosh:

  MacWrite, MacPaint from Apple;
  MultiPlan and Basic from Microsoft;
  MAGICPhone by Artsci;
  ClickArt by T/Maker Graphics;
  MacForth by Creative Solutions;
  Transylvania by Penguin Software;
  and MegaMerge by MegaHaus.

In May developers expect to ship ten applications (including Microsoft Chart), and in June there should be at least 35 additional applications (eg. Macintosh Pascal).

3. All Apple products are under 90 day warranty.  All Dealers are required to stock spare parts for our computers.  The Macintosh reliability rate has been extremely high.  I'm surprised to hear that this particular person has had trouble with servicing his Macintosh.  If he would call Apple (Donna Dubinsky, Manager of Distribution) in Cupertino I'm sure she would be more than happy to help solve the problem.

Hope you continue to enjoy your Macintosh.

Great pride attaches to Mac's small footprint -- only "x" inches wide and "y" inches deep.  In fact, I have a shelf just "y" inches in depth right beside my desk...obviously a great place to put the Mac.

Except, those big rigid cable connectors sticking out behind the Mac (and most other terminals and PCs) add effectively at least 2", and closer to 3" to the required depth.  We need all this hardware to attach 3 or 4 tiny wires?!?!

In addition, if you happen to be carrying your Mac around the house with the cables attached, and you catch one of those connectors on a piece of furniture or the edge of a doorway, it breaks off the whole connector receptacle, in a manner that's most excruciatingly difficult to repair...

My vacuum cleaner neatly rolls up and stores its own cords; so does my slide projector.  With all the sophistication involved in the design of these computers and terminals, when is some elementary product design ingenuity going to be applied to simple cable connections that come out the bottom of the machine, or a slot or a little enclosure, or something!!!

Apple, are you listening...?

I just received news concerning the Fat Mac, of which we have all heard so much: the Macintosh, with 512K.  It has been released and is on its way, delivery date approximately three weeks (or thereabouts; delivery dates haven't been Apple's strong point lately).

I also received news about its price. Brace yourselves.

$995.  Yes, you read right: that's nine hundred ninety-five big ones, to be removed deftly from your wallet and placed just as deftly into theirs. All that on top of the $2495 (or $2195, if you happened to get it in one of the recent sales that have started to spring up here and there) which all us Macfans have already shelled out.

[Background:  My friends and I who purchased Macs are not the businessmen-types that the Mac seems to be aimed at.  We are but simple college students, not fortunate enough (or rich enough, as the case may be) to attend one of the schools in the Apple University Consortium, and get our Macs for dirt cheap.  No, we go to the University of New Mexico, in the Land of Enchantment (Land of Enchantment? You've got to be kidding.

Do you know what it feels like to live in one of the few places in the civilized world where you can still catch the bubonic plague?  The PLAGUE, for God's sake!!!).  Therefore, we had to spring for the big bucks, and don't get off on this account.  OK, back to righteous indignation.]

They have got to be kidding!  When the Mac was first announced, the price was $1995; not bad, considering what you get in a Mac.  Then, when it finally saw the light of day, filtered through display windows, the price had somehow escalated to $2495 -- for the bare-bones system, of course. Steep, but still within the range of those of us fortunate enough to have that kind of cash handy or to have a sympathetic loan officer.  This, of course, was the 128K Mac; the fully-realized Mac was on its way, by the end of the year, just hang on, we'll get it to you, 512K, Real Soon Now, wow, gosh ...

Well, they sure got it to us, all right.  For the measly sum of damn near a thousand bucks extra, we plebes can get ourselves the system that should have come out in the first place.  So now Apple has us all over a barrel.  We all sprung our $2995 for the Mac and the printer, and shortly afterwards realized that the thing was absolutely useless without the second disk drive.  So, another $495 went down the drain.  Next comes the realization that with the basic 128K, the user is left with too little memory to accomplish anything significant.  So, another $995 down the tubes.

Thus Steve Jobs' vision of the computer that anyone can use has become the computer that no one can afford, because a workable system sells for $4485. What a bargain!

Looks like Steve & Co. are standing by to rake in the big bucks; The Rest of Us can all bend over and grab our ankles.  It's coming in dry, folks; no Vaseline on this one.

Now, damn it, I really like the Mac -- I really do.  It's got a few rough spots, but nothing a little software and minor hardware changes couldn't fix.  That's what the Fat Mac was supposed to be all about, at least as far as hardware went.  I, personally, wouldn't own anything else, certainly not another faceless, amorphous blob from the IBM PC CloneMakers.  All in all, I think it's the best thing to hit the market since -- well, since the Apple II.  And buying Apple is like buying Hewlett-Packard: once you buy one, you tend to stick with it.  At least, I do, and I'm sure there's a lot of people out there like me.

But pulling little stunts like this is not going to earn old Stevie Boy any new friends.  I can hear Jerry Pournelle cackling away in the depths of Chaos Manor now, chortling, "I told you so!"  Oh, sure, eventually the price of the changeover will probably drop -- maybe to $500.  The point is, however, that it shouldn't have to.  $500 is the price they should be charging now -- and even that's excessive.  They should properly be giving the damn thing away for the price of labor, since the price hike in the beginning covers what the upgrade should be costing now.  But they won't. And by delivering yet another shaft to the long-suffering-but-loyal followers of the Macintosh, Apple has shown that, in the end, they're not that much different from any other computer company, that they don't really give a damn about the end-user, and that the final arbiter is, as we all suspected but hoped against hope was not true, the bottom line on the ledger books.

I guess 1984 is a little more like _1984_ than we might've hoped.

From The Rest of Us to Apple: one extremely loud and heartfelt Bronx cheer.

Hooray for Mike Conley for telling it like it is.  Except that he was a little to kind.  He forgot to mention that if we had all waited just a few months we could have saved ourselves some big bucks.

Here's a little arithmetic:  right now I can buy a 128K Mac for $2,000. That's a $500 discount from list.  Apple has dropped the price (effective someday) by $300.  That means we can expect to see the 128K Mac (the Tiny Mac?) (The inadequate Mac?) selling for $1700.  Add a thousand to that and you get $2700.  That's what I expect to see the Fat Mac selling for real soon now.  That's $200 more than I paid for my Meager Mac.  That's a hell of a lot of depreciation to see in just a few months, just a few months after the product is released.

Just think how Apple would be doing right now if everybody had been smart and played it safe.  If everybody had realized the truth - that Apple is just another greedy, screw the customer corporation.  (Even IBM does better - they put the screws to their business partners.  Apple does it to their custumers) If everbody had played wait and see (like the folks who Apple is now rewarding), Apple would be in deep trouble right now.

Considering that, before the Mac, the only thing decent thing they produced was little more than a toy, and that they have produced failure after failure - if the Mac had not sold well that company would now be worth zip!  And we who took Apple on faith (the software will be out next month, next month, next month), who believed that Apple was a little different have been thanked in a very nice manner: "You've been stupid enough to cough up the bucks so far - so why not be real stupid and cough
up some more".

Damn you Steve Jobs.

P.S.  I've called Apple ((408) 996-1010), have you?  I was rude.
P.P.S.  What do you think of a guy who starts out robbing the phone company and ends up robbing his customers?
P.P.P.S. Is anybody going to be stupid enough to buy a Fat Mac at $3100?

"Andy Hertzfeld talks to the Stanford techies, Feb 28
 
Living in the Palo Alto area gives me good access to Apple and the users group at Stanford gets many speakers at its Technical sessions from Apple.

Last month Tessler and Dan Cochran spoke to us about future Mac development environments and shell applications (MacApp).  Last night Andy Hertzfeld came over to show us the latest version of Switcher (1.22) and the latest goodies in the new Finder (3.0x).

The Finder now has a generalized way of selecting a set of applications to switch between without incurring the full overhead of the Finder, similar the the "transfer" menu bar in the MDS package, but more general, it looks nice.  The new Finder is distinctly faster than the current one.

Andy also talked about the Laser printer and the crazies over at Adobe who insisted on using floating point arithmetic to do their calculations.  Part of the reason that it is a bit on the slow side.  He thinks that the ROM upgrade (to 128K) will not be done until this fall when Apple will also upgrade the disks to double sided and add a hierarchical file system as well.

He told us that one of the Apple engineers saw the adjust the pot fix for the Mac XL, got mad and came up with a real fix that includes a new set of ROMs for the Lisa (oops, I mean Mac) and some changes to the video board.  Square pixels on the Lisa, wow!  I asked Andy if one could use the workshop with the fix in, and he replied that it was like a sex change operation. We spent some time chewing the rag about future Macs, which probably will contain a 68020.

Andy told us of one incident a few years ago when he purchased his  Apple II.  He was so excited about having a computer of his own that he  had absolute control over that he kept on toggling the power switch until he blew the power supply.

He also mentioned that some commercial software checks for the presence  of Macsbug and takes action to nullify it as a tool for removing copy protection code.  This is one thing the programs can't do to MacNosy as they are not active when MacNosy is running."