Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ns-mx!iowasp.physics.uiowa.edu!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!ai-lab!wookumz.ai.mit.edu!rjc From: rjc@wookumz.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Some MAC and Amiga Comparisons. aka Marc Blunders Message-ID: <11394@life.ai.mit.edu> Date: 16 Oct 90 12:57:12 GMT References: <33618@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: None Lines: 80 In article <33618@nigel.ee.udel.edu> BARRETT@owl.ecil.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett) writes: > >In article <1990Oct16.015911.3837@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Ethan Solomita > writes: > >>In article <33538@nigel.ee.udel.edu> WHE46@ccvax.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett) writes: > > I dispute the prices you gave for the above systems. The education >price for the MAC LC itself is $1750, and the education price of the >AppleColor monitor is at most $500. You also have to add $150 to >the A3000 system for an ArcNET card, because the MAC has built-in >networking. Tallied up, this brings the MAC LC to $2250, and the >A3000 to $2750. A big enough difference that many educational >institutions would rather go with the MAC LC system. > > Here is a further reason why many will go with the MAC system. It >just plain looks great. What people see first in any system is not >the speed of the SCSI controller or whether or not it has a FPU. What >people notice first is the quality of the display, and the A3000 cannot >touch the MAC in this area. On the systems at school, a new Finder >has been installed that uses 256-color icons. The resulting display >looks vastly better than AmigaOS2.0 ever will, with it's 4-color >WB. Marc, your hang up is on color. And thats your mistake. How come so many institutions buy Ibms (monochrome) or Unixes (w/o X)? You like color! But NOT everyone has your same tastes. 256 color Icons are such a waste of disk space, and memory bandwidth I don't see a use for them. As it is now, I have workbench screen in 2 color mode (using a program to cut out the other plane) I have never seen anyone who uses a 16color WB, or stuff like DropShadow, Simgen. First off, you take a big performance hit, second. Its ANNOYING. Color is a novelty, sure when you first get it, your all excited, and waste time downloadings tons of pictures and demos, but after awhile it wears off. Couple with the Fact that the LC is only a 68020, 256 color processing will be SLOW, probably as slow as my A500. Just remember, that not every cares to have digitized 16million color icons that take up the whole screen and bring your computer speed down to a turtle. the LC and SI are crippled, they only have 1 expansion slow. > BTW, what are you going to run on that A3000 system, besides games >and multimedia software? There is nothing available for the Amiga in >the line of engineering, scientific, and education software. This is the real problem. It has nothing to do with the hardware. But the Amiga has its market, (Multimedia) and the Mac has its (Science). Of course, when the A3000 UX is release, this will be irrelevant, but i'd rather have Unix for software, then a Mac. >> >> Building from an A500 system is stupid, especially >>because the expansion is so much more expensive than on >>2000s/3000 that the extra cost for the 2000/3000 is mad up. You >>can clearly see that the A3000 is far better than an expanded >>A500! Clearly the Amiga is not behind. The A3000 listed above is >>a much more powerful system than the LC and the difference is >>only $100. > > The A500 is Commodore's lowest-cost system, and I wanted to show that >even the A500 cannot stack up against the new MACs in price and performance. This is irrelevant. Try comparing the A500 against the Classic. The LC and SI are more integrated, so try using a more integrated machine as a base. (A2000/3000). Sheesh, why don't you just build a Vic 20 up to a Cray? The A500 can stack up to a Classic, and the A3000-16 can stack up to an LC. > > -MB- -- "NeXTs are useless... Mac's are irrelevent.. IBM's are futile. Amiga's,however, are quite nice!" -Capt Jeal-Luc Amiga | Flames to /dev/null Ray Cromwell rjc@wookumz.ai.mit.edu | // AMIGA! \\ "Your software will adapt to service ours!"| \X/ AMIGA! \X/