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From: denbeste@bgsuvax.UUCP (William C. DenBesten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Upgrade your Mac 512 now!
Message-ID: <798@bgsuvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-Apr-87 08:22:41 EST
Article-I.D.: bgsuvax.798
Posted: Thu Apr 23 08:22:41 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Apr-87 18:44:05 EST
References: <3022@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>
Organization: Bowling Green State University B.G., Oh.
Lines: 32

in article <3022@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>, jww@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU (Joel West) says:
> Why upgrade?  Why will others upgrade?  Basically, because a Mac
> 512 will be obsolete by the end of the year:
> 
>    2.	Their programs will begin to use the 128K ROM; less than
> 	20% (my guess) of the machines today have old ROM's
> 	and the percentage will decline as new machines are sold.
>    3.	Apple has told developers to target for 128K or later, because
> 	their market research says those who don't have money for
> 	a ROM upgrade (particularly one that doubles disk capacity)
> 	don't have much money for software.

What about "Higher Education"?  We have probably 100 512K macs on campus.
To upgrade these would cost us about $17,800, _including_ our educational
discount.  We could buy ourselves another 18 mac 512Es for this kind of money.
This would be another 18 macs to help spread the load in our seriously
overcrowded labs.

We have been pouring all of the money that we have for hardware into new
machines.  This is the only thing that we can reasonably do when there are 
people waiting for machines to become free.  We do, however, swap drives
so that every machine has an 800K drive.


It occurs to me that apple could make life much simpler for developers by
selling the ROMS without the disk drives for $5.00 to $10.00.  ( ROMS cost
perhaps $.10 in the quantities apple buys. )

We could probably convince the powers that be to spend $500-$1000 to upgrade
the existing macs.  This would also virtually guarantee that every remaining
mac would be upgraded to new ROMS. It would then become unnecessary to 
support 64K roms.