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From: hansen%cs.uiowa.edu@RELAY.CS.NET (Kurt Hansen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: The Woz and the Apple IIGS, //x
Message-ID: <8611151558.aa10123@VGR.BRL.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 14-Nov-86 09:31:18 EST
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Posted: Fri Nov 14 09:31:18 1986
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The IWM is in the Mac!  Also, the drives are similar enough to make it
possible to read/write unidisk (//) format on the Mac drives and vice
versa.  I have seen products which claim to read back and forth already.
Writing is about as hard a problem as breaking copy protection schemes,
so it is slower to come out.  Once Apple had such a design (the IWM), it
only makes sense to use it in all their computers, (financial sense and
compatibility sense).
By the way, I've heard that the Macintosh line is now out-selling the 
IBM PC-AT line by almost two-to-one (in terms of market share). A hard
blow has been struck for Apple-kind!
A comment (while I'm at it) on the //x of the future.  It is now possible
to build a machine (with a 65816, a 68020, and a 80386) which would run
software from Apple //, Macintosh, and MS-DOS families.  (wow!)  However,
what would be the advantage?  Perfect compatibility would be elusive, the
machine would be expensive (at least in the present and next couple of years),
and would be a massive pain to service and support, since dealers would need
to handle all three lines on one machine.  I see two advantages to offset
all that:  1) being able to have just one machine (multiply expanded though
it would be for most of us), and 2) massive choice of software and extras.

Personally I don't see a market for such a machine until it can be priced
at current Mac / //gs / PC XT levels.  Businesses typically stay in one 
product family, so there goes the high end.  I think it will be awhile, with
my guess at the retail of such a machine being in the $5000 range, at least,
and fully configured well over $10,000.

Kurt