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From: philip@pescadero.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Sun's Competitive Strategy (Was: Re: P1754
Message-ID: <1990Dec4.080929.18389@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 4 Dec 90 08:09:29 GMT
References: <1990Nov16.225515.494@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Nov25.194404.3376@dircon.uucp> <1635@unix386.Convergent.COM> <1990Dec2.014554.3491@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <2760@cirrusl.UUCP> <2764@cirrusl.UUCP>
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Reply-To: philip@pescadero.stanford.edu
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
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In article <2764@cirrusl.UUCP>, dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
|> The state-of-the-art today in single-user machines is anywhere from 10
|> to 30 MIPS depending upon your budget.  People buying 80x86-based
|> systems are mostly buying machines running 80286 and 80386 CPUs at 16
|> MHz or higher.  The Apple Classic *does not* cost $750 in any usable
|> configuration.  (And educational discounts only benefit a small
|> minority of users.) Add a decent amount of mass storage and other
|> peripherals and you can easily pay $2,000 or more.  There's just no
|> comparison with equivalent 80386SX-based systems.
The street price of the basic Classic is not much more than $750. The
_list_ price of the next model up, with 2M of RAM and a 40M hard disk is
$1500. The street price is probably much lower. This is certainly a
usable system, if only just. I'm not claiming this is a fantastic deal.
All I said was people are queueing up to buy them at this price. This
doesn't mean they are "state of the art", "cheaper than an 80386SUX (*)
system" or whatever else you want to read into this.

Thank you for your indulgence; can we get back to talking about architecture
now?
-- 
Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu

(*) Meaningless name to ensure I don't launch another "my computer is better
than yours" war.


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