Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!yale!think!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!tmyers
From: tmyers@athena.mit.edu (Tracy S Myers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Accepting the Mac (was Re: More Macweek Rumors)
Message-ID: <1990Mar17.172902.9711@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 17 Mar 90 17:29:02 GMT
References: <1848@crash.cts.com> <18491@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <12667@thorin.cs.unc.edu> <1990Mar17.053255.22944@agate.berkeley.edu> <4429@mace.cc.purdue.edu>
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Reply-To: tmyers@athena.mit.edu (Tracy S Myers)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 48

In article <4429@mace.cc.purdue.edu> asd@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Doug McClure) writes:

>Too bad, they didn't so it's a moot point.  I love arguements with these
>"if Apple had intro'ed a 68000-IIgs".  How about IF Apple had pursued
>the Apple II market, if they had supported development for the Apple II,
>if they had pushed Mensch for better/faster cpu's, or done it
>themselves, we'd have a great, incredible machine that wouldn't be being
>beat-up by most every other machine on the market.  Or how about if the
>AppleII hadn't paid for the Mac and hadn't totally fed it money to keep
>development going, and had pumped it into AppleII development, all you
>Mac "Kill the II by merging" folks wouldn't have much to spew about.
>They didn't, so why even argue that.  Time to do something about the
>present.
>
[Stuff deleted]
>
>Might be nice to have a board for Mac users who would like access to
>AppleII but I sure don't see it as a replacement for the AppleII.  They
>ARE two different lines, they've ALWAYS been two different lines, I
>don't see it changing anytime soon, if even ever.  If anything, I vote
>for merging the Mac into the AppleII vs. AppleII into Mac.  After all,
>we (AppleII's) paid for them so in essence, they exist only because of
>AppleII's.  Be funny seeing what Mac users thought about that!  I don't
>even wanna know, cuz I could care less, it ain't gonna happen.
>
>-k
Every product line has a limited lifetime.  The apple ][ line is 
nearly 15 years old.  In 1983 I went with my father to buy a computer
for his office.  The salesperson tried to sell him a ][e.  I persuaded
him to buy a PC-XT.  It was one of my better pieces of advice.  The ][
series is a dead line.  It was killed long ago by MS-DOS which squeezed
it out of the business market, and by Commodore 64's
and the like (which were far cheaper) that squeezed it out of the home
market.  All the talk about what Apple should have done 10 years ago
won`t change market reality.  Even if Apple had made substantially
more powerful ][-series machines, it seems unlikely they would have
been able to overcome either the market's perception of the ][ as a 'home' 
computer or the perception that `IBM`( meaning the IBM name) legitimized 
the personal computer in business.  The only people buying the ][ series
in any numbers in recent years are schools.  I don't want to start
a Apple ][ is better than MS-DOS or Mac or other such war.  I merely
want to point out that for better or worse, the ][ is dead for reasons
which do not neccessarily concern the machine or its capabilities.

Wake up and take a hard look at reality.  I used to have an Apple ][e, and
was very fond of it.  In its day it was a very nice machine, but no
amount of upgrading and patching up will help the ][.  It's dead so let
it rest in peace.