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From: bostrov@prism.cs.orst.edu (Vareck Bostrom)
Subject: Re: Low End NeXTs (was Re: Desktop publishing)
Message-ID: <1991Apr02.072745.20888@lynx.CS.ORST.EDU>
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Organization: Oregon State University, Computer Science Dept
References: <14483@life.ai.mit.edu> <4753@lectroid.sw.stratus.com> <1991Apr1.200929.17719@noose.ecn.purdue.edu>
Distribution: orst
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 91 07:27:45 GMT

In <1991Apr1.200929.17719@noose.ecn.purdue.edu> songer@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu (Christopher M Songer) writes:

>Jim Mann writes:
>>
>>Yes, NeXT has the Mac beat for now at the high Mac high end. A NeXT station
>>is a better buy than the high-end Mac

>... More insightful stuff about pricing and software availability ...

>>you need more speed, the SE30 is available for about $2400. 

[ stuff deleted ]

>As long as Next keeps this as their low end they will (IMHO, of course)
>reamin at best a niche machine and possibly go out of business. Consider,
>NeXT is certainly not going to lead MIPS/$$ very long. In fact the Sparc II has
>already got the Cube beat hands down.

Really? I got my NeXT for $5000, and get 23040 dhrystones out of it. A
SPARC-2 would have cost me $15,000 (which I don't have) and only get me
(unupgradable) 32000 dhrys. I think the NeXT still has that one.

[ stuff about nice but expensive NeXT software deleted ]

>Maybe Next should consider making a standalone, cheap, 68030 based machine
>something that could sell bunches and drive the software market prices down.
>The Next seems to suffer from being a mix of workstation and PC rather
>than benefit from the mix. It has the high price of a workstation (both
>hardware and to a lesser degree software) while not being able to keep
>up with the fastest workstations. 

>If they were to strip off all the Network stuff from both the hardware and
>software, maybe they could make a machine that would be able to appeal to
>more people, and still have reasonable performance. (after all, 030's
>ran OK with a harddrive.)

NO! NeXT should be competing with workstations, not with PC's such as
the Macintosh. I think the entire Idea about NeXT is to have a machine that
has Everything That You'd Ever Want right there on the machine that you buy.
NeXT is in a position where it's developers know that they can devolop 
network applications, and the NeXT has the hardware to support those apps. 
Same with Floating Point and Signal/Array processing hardware. Every NeXT
has it, so devolopers don't have to worry about devoloping seperate modules
for each and every possible hardware configureation. 

Also, it's silly for NeXT to go backwards to a 68030 now, IMHO, they 
are already doing fairly well with their 040 machines, and how much money
would it actually drop the price, going to an 030? 

I hope that in the near future, the entry level machines will be those with
only one CPU (68040 or 68050 (?)) and the higher level machines will contain
multiple CPU's. But no matter what, NeXTs should all have all of the 
hardware that they come with today, networking and all.


- Vareck Bostrom
----------------
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bostrov@prism.cs.orst.edu		+ Forwarded to gnu.ai.mit.edu