This week's issue of Electronic Engineering Times has a small (1.5"x2") picture, on the front page, which is supposed to be of the Mac.  Also the same rag has a large (~9" x 9") artist cutaway drawing of the "Mac". Showing that it has a relatively small (~10" x 10") base and stands approximately 14 inches tall.  There is a detached keyboard, using a telephone style cable connection to the front of the case.

The back of the unit shows several connections.  One for a printer (probably a parallel interface); another for an external disk drive (maybe you can connect to more than one (?) and more than one type (?)) of drive; another, an RS-232; and finally an RS-422 (I think that that is a *very* high speed serial interface).  Interestingly, there is also a "polyphonic sound port" connection also.  (poly = more than one, phonic = sound, so more than one sound?.  Note that two sound capability would typically be called "stereo", so I read polyphonic as being at least three sound channels).

There is one (Sony) 3.5" disk drive recessed into the front of the cabinet of the main unit.  Since the main unit is so tall, with the screen placed in the top half of it, and the approx. 80 sq. in motherboard is in the bottom of the air cooled column, there appears to be quite a lot of room between those two items.  More than enough for that smallish Sony disk drive . . . perhaps, later, there will be a hard drive to fill the void?

All in all, my first impression of this thing is that I thought it was about one of the ugliest, production computers I have ever seen.  I sure hope that the Mac has some truly fantastic software and firmware to make up for the lack of looks and color capability!

I saw the sales brochure that will be on dealer floors on Tuesday or Wednesday. To add to what Chuck said, the screen is about 512 x 350 (or so) bit mapped.

The SONY drive is 400kb, and you don't need another controller to add the second one.  It comes with a one-button mouse, of course.  Standard software will be MACwrite (like Lisa's) MACproject (ditto), and MACdraw (or something).  Later there will be a Multiplan with Mouse/Window enhancements.

Now available at extra cost is MACterminal.  The basic package will be $2,500; an Imagewriter printer will be another $500.  I don't believe there are any parallel ports.  No language support, except for a Microsoft BASIC with Mice/Window support.  They will be on dealer shelves the day of the announcement.

Mike

.and I'm still with the same company!

Well, after months and months of waiting I finally got a glimpse of the MACINTOSH.  While I was extremely impressed with what it could do, I was also dissappointed by what it couldn't do.

What I mean is ... with no internal slots, and as of yet (to the best of my knowledge) no means of programming the machine, (and more appropriately the mouse, and 68000 MPU) it is not quite the dream of a hacker ... or even an experience programmer who likes to see himself tested once in a while.

I don't know .. is it just me, or does anyone else out there have similiar feeling on the subject.  I would really like to here from anyone who has seen the MAC and gotten either similiar, or different feelings.

I just got back from a seminar in (sunny) Ft. Lauderdale at which the VP of Sales and Marketing from Apple spoke.  (Curiously enough he was the coach of the Columbia University football team about five years ago, makes you wonder about a lot of things.)

He confirmed a number of things mentioned in previous Mac notes on this list.  Yes for $25 you can connect up to 32 Macs (and I think Lisas). This "network" uses twisted pair, I guess not much else could be used for $25. He also mentioned a laser printer and file server for this network were in the future.  The price of the laser printer is to be under $5,000. I'd like to see that.

The most important thing he had to say was that though Apple was glad to cash in on all the free publicity and excitement for the MacIntosh the more important thing Apple wanted to convey was that Apple had a "product line", the Apple System 32 SuperMicroComputer. That product line is made up of the Mac and the three Lisas.

He was also very explicit about how aggressive Apple is going to be in the marketplace.  They are going to offer some form of quantity discounts for national accounts.  The details of this and how that interfaces with their current dealer network will be announced on Thursday.  Also in this vein they are targeting Universities and select Fortune 500 accounts at big discounts to crack IBM strangle hold on the market.  This should be an interesting fight.  Stay tuned.

The Mac is just what the doctor ordered for millions of would-be computer users.  Apple has really got its act together on this one.

Journalists seem to be spreading all sorts of disinformation such as: no keybad, not expandable, no hard disk, not IBM compatible, etc.  I predict the MAC will be the apple II all over again.  Apple will be selling lots of these machines and users who are not computer scientists will at last have a computer that they can relate to.

I think the screen is big enough, a keypad is optional but obtainable, hard disks will be available, some expansion will be allowed, a great deal of 3rd-party software, including games will be available, it will be IBM-compatible, hard disks will be available and Apple will meet the challenge that IBM presents.

IBM, where only the janitors are creative, will have to bring out something to compete, and then will act like they invented it. Anyone who doubts the viability of Apple has their eyes closed.      

During the development of the Macintosh I was in contact (through a friend) with some people at Apple, and I have been long awaiting its arrival.  I fooled around with this amazing machine-on-two-boards in a local computer store and it blew me away.  A man with a little kid came into the store,
asked me and my friend about ten questions, played with the computer for five minutes, bought one, and walzed out the door.

Mac documentation is excellent.  I glanced through the manuals and they've got something for everyone, hackers included.  Some are very elementary, but a bunch give good inside data (more of which is to come).  One of the great things about Mac is that, from a users standpoint, you don't have to read a single word to operate it.  My friend told me to "click the mouse button twice" and from there on I was home free.

I went to the big splash the Boston Computer Society put on Monday night. Jobs, Wozniak, and about nine of Mac's developers were on hand;  they put on a *really slick* multimedia show that was quite fun. Before the main session there were handson tutorials;  I got about twenty
minutes to play.

I have only a few things to add (Tom Wood's message was complete and 99% accurate):

1) The ONLY memory expansion planned is the replacement (for a fee) of the 64K chips with 256K chips, yielding 512K.

2) The "upgrade" from Lisa 1 to Lisa 2/5 (which consists of replacing the two 5-1/4" drives with one 3-1/2" drive, and a new skin) is free, not $595 as previously reported.  (A friend of mine, who paid $10,000 for a Lisa 1 eight months ago, is not impressed.)

3) Don't know if this software is generally availble, but at the show they had Mac speaking to the audience.  The quality of the voice was pretty good.

4) The T-shirt the girl in the commercial wore has an impressionistic sketch of a Mac on the front, and the word "Macintosh" (the 'i' is lower case) on the back.  They were giving them out before the show; I'm wearing mine now.

5) And yes, although I wish it had more memory, it's an impressive accomplishment. Prediction: they'll sell a million of them.

You probably won't hear this from anybody else, so I think it's time somebody played the devil's advocate with respect to the MacIntosh.

Before I do, I will say some good things about the Mac so you won't think I am totally negative.  First it will probably save Apple from getting eaten alive by IBM. Second, Apple's stock should go back up.  Third it does use a lot of novel ideas and makes them affordable.  Fourth, they'll probably sell a lot of machines.

But not to me.

If I was in the market for a personal computer today and wanted only the current functionality available on the MacIntosh, I would sooner buy a Kaypro or a Chameleon and take the money I saved and buy a printer.

I find Apple's marketing approach (though superbly timed and coordinated) to be insulting to my intelligence. "You don't have to memorize all those commands". So WHAT'S WRONG with memorizing stuff?  Is it really that difficult to learn new things?

Apple is taking the typical American marketing approach: create a need where it didn't exist before, then come up with a bunch of features to meet it.  Tell everybody how stupid they are and how difficult it is to use computers.  Make everything look really dark.  Then, voila! spring the answer  -- the mouse!!

Really, you need a mouse with a word processor or spreadsheet like you need automatic transmission.  It's a nice feature to have but you can learn to get along without it.  My question is.  Is the extra functionality worth the extra price?  I'm afraid that this message won't get home to consumers amidst all the glamour and hoopla.

Now for the finale.  Last year the buzzword was integration.  You couldn't possibly function in the office and keep your boss happy without integrated software.  Where's the integration with the MacIntosh?  Can we forget about integrated software now?

The only Mac I get is going to have sesame seeds on top of it.

Peripherals on a serial comm port have to cost more than those on an parallel synchronous (synchronous in the sense of working within processor cycles) bus.

I realize that we're debating the average number of peripherals per system, typical performance requirements, etc., in order to arrive at an economic conjecture as to the market potential of this machine. But the end of the matter seems to be that Apple chose to make the base system as cheap as possible (for the "mass market"), knowing that expansion would be more costly. They could have chosen 1 internal slot, or 2, or N, but they chose zero, and in consideration of the market and what most people buy computers for, this N is lower than the optimal.

What cost slots?  A serial interface for your typical peripheral, say an Okidata dot-matrix printer, to convert from the parallel (read, bus-like) to serial (read, MacIntosh-like) interface, costs $100. Not a $5 bill, as per Jobs, for a microprocessor, although the Okidata interface uses one. I think $75 might be a fair estimate of the extra cost to serialize a MacIntosh peripheral's interface.  Job's argument, though a simplistic cost estimate, could be just as well applied to an internal parallel bus, "add a $5 bill [for a card connector and printed circuit foil to extend the CPU and other signals] to the motherboard, and then talk..."  Note also that the daisy-chain pair of serial connectors cost about the same as the bus-slot edge connector.

I don't know what the "Macintosh Finder" is, but there must be substantial interplay of textual directives and icon-pointing directives.  Icons are a means to implement menus, and menus have this shortcoming.  The theory here is that if the task is simple the user-interface can be too; but if the task is complex and requires discretion, detail, and finesse, a menu is unsuitable (even if implemented in pictures).  Most word processing is simple in this way; software development isn't and everybody agrees Macintosh isn't targeted at development.  In between we have a debate.  My judgment would be that the profitable tasks yet to be computer-tooled will not be best implemented with the Star/Lisa/Macintosh style.  They are too entropic to be fitted with a menu abstraction.

This limited applicability is in tension with the strong potential of Macintosh in the school/college market, where flexibility and compatibility are important. Apple has always been strong in low-end academic applications. They're risking a lot by not meeting the academic pricing and demand until late this year.

The software quality point is critical.  Since the firmware/software is graphic-oriented, it is especially difficult to commercially harden.  If it's not 99.99% bullet-proof, and at least the reviewers' and software developers' models were not, then the product will be stuck with a bugginess stigma.

I admire the wealth of functionality and optimization in the user-interface toolbox.  But a few booby traps in there will turn off customers.  The type of customer who is least forgiving of bugs is exactly that customer who is supposed to be attracted to the Macintosh:  that naive soul who knows not the nature of a software bug, how to avoid it, or how to work around it.  Where bugs are much embedded in firmware, the bug-killer will be hard to apply.

My objections as to response time delays due to big overhead are mostly based on the Lisa experience.  With her you waited 45 seconds to just delete a file or start a new application.  Having a 68000 and hard disk, it was difficult to explain why the delay was that long.  Now there's Macintosh with a single floppy, supposedly using software descended from Lisa.  Magazine reviewers and non-computer people who don't know better don't think much about response time (or at least the reviewers don't write much about it).  But its a top-priority item.  I'm assuming that Macintosh is slower than Lisa.

Isn't it an error to introduce an ultimate word-processing microcomputer without any letter-quality output device?

The argument that software compatibility isn't important because software developers will supply all that's needed is circular.  All kinds of software is written for every computer made, but only successfully marketed computers get software that is effectively produced, marketed, and supported.  If your machine is software compatible then you get the benefits of these products. If a machine isn't compatible with anything, then nobody will market (with the emphasis on market) software for it until a lot of them are sold.  But not many will sell without all kinds of niche-oriented vertical software, which depends many machines being sold first, etc.  Let's be realistic about this.  No software developer willingly ignores a market, but there will not necessarily or initially be enough Macintosh computers in the hands of people with money to spend on software to motivate software houses to develop products AND spend the development costs five times again to get the developments to market.

Writing and hardening software is only 20% of the software development job in the microcomputer mass market.  The up-front cost to publish, market, and support a software product before any revenue is realized is much, much greater.

This is one reason why so much software became available for the IBM PC. Developers knew that the machines would be sold in quantity, and justified the enormous investments in marketing required to sell a successful product.

I still think that service is going to be a sore point. Apple dealer service may be great.  But without free-market (that is, without any interference from Apple) third party maintenance, your Macintosh will be at the mercy of a maintenance monopoly. Good for Apple and their authorized dealers." Bad for customers.  Companies and dealers that use the "authorized" gimmickry are only trying to artificially eliminate competitors that provide cost and/or quality options that Apple can't.

 Apple most certainly will not give you a new computer if yours breaks.  Would you buy a car that had a seal on the hood latch, to be opened only by your authorized car dealer?  The analogy isn't perfect, but think of why the hood latch seal is objectionable, and the same reasons apply to a computer's cover screws.

Calling dealers "authorized" and putting seals on cases are two old retailing tricks.  They are telling you that you are not qualified to judge the fitness of a repair organization.  They and only they will decide who should fix your computer (if you let them get away with so deciding, which you don't have to ).  This socialist method is supported by middling-size businesses to raise service income above the competitive rates without raising service quality or costs.  The joke is that it doesn't work.  The seals become meaningless after a few months since the technicians get tired of policing and applying silly little stickers. You can't void a warranty or charge extra because of a broken seal, anyway, unless the customer signed an explicit agreement to waive warranty for a damaged sticker before the sale. Anybody can call themselves "authorized" because legally anybody can try to fix your Apple computer if you want them to, and it doesn't void the warranty to do so. Provisions to the contrary in gilded warranty text are not valid in most states.

All in all it's distasteful marketing bunko.  Tell that to your local authorized seal-preserving dealer and see if he doesn't either misunderstand this or get embarrassed.

By the way, if Apple tried to enforce pricing (strict or otherwise) on parts, they would be in violation of antitrust law and either enjoined or out of business.  Kaypro is in court for dealer price-fixing now.

Summary: What's unique to the Macintosh?  Not price.  Not the bit-mapped display (IBM PC, too).  Not the software/firmware model (also available on the PC).  Not the mouse (...).  Well, the TV and print advertising are novel. The post-mortem on the failure of the original Lisa to sell was basically (1) too expensive (2) too slow (3) too narrow marketing target.  Think about it, nobody could say those things about the original Apple II.  My prediction is that we will be saying it about Macintosh.

I don't know what the "Macintosh Finder" is, but there must be substantial interplay of textual directives and icon-pointing directives.  Icons are a means to implement menus, and menus have this shortcoming.  The theory here is that if the task is simple the user-interface can be too; but if the task is complex and requires discretion, detail, and finesse, a menu is unsuitable (even if implemented in pictures).

My judgment would be that the profitable tasks yet to be computer-tooled will not be best implemented with the Star/Lisa/Macintosh style. They are too entropic to be fitted with a menu abstraction.

The software quality point is critical.  Since the firmware/software is graphic-oriented, it is especially difficult to commercially harden.  If it's not 99.99% bullet-proof, and at least the reviewers' and software developers' models were not, then the product will be stuck with a bugginess stigma.

I admire the wealth of functionality and optimization in the user-interface toolbox.  But a few booby traps in there will turn off customers.  The type of customer who is least forgiving of bugs is exactly that customer who is supposed to be attracted to the Macintosh:  that naive soul who knows not the nature of a software bug, how to avoid it, or how to work around it.  Where bugs are much embedded in firmware, the bug-killer will be hard to apply.
...
 I'm assuming that Macintosh is slower than Lisa.