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From: zrm@eddie.MIT.EDU (Zigurd R. Mednieks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Worries about Macintosh
Message-ID: <6912@eddie.MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 17-Sep-87 15:16:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: eddie.6912
Posted: Thu Sep 17 15:16:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Sep-87 15:01:38 EDT
References: <76000018@uiucdcsp> <7334@felix.UUCP>
Reply-To: zrm@eddie.MIT.EDU (Zigurd R. Mednieks)
Organization: MIT, EE/CS Computer Facilities, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 41

In article <7334@felix.UUCP> bytebug@felix.UUCP (Roger L. Long) writes:
>In article <76000018@uiucdcsp> gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>> ....  Example: The SE is
>>configured to force people to buy hard disks from Apple (why can't I
>>buy an SE with one disk and buy a third-party HD?  I must waste $$$ on
>>a 2-disk system).
>
>sell it to a Mac owner who has upgraded their system to an internal
>800K drive and still has that 400K external drive which Apple refuses
>to upgrade.
>
It appears that Apple is fostering a black market they would like to never
see develop. Once there is a supply of Genuine Sony 800k drives floating
around (with no reasonable way of tracking them) there is sure to be a
black market in copies of 128k ROMs. Dealers will participate by putting in
third party disk systems and removing the 800k drives. They have no use
for them, so they will go out the door with the customer or they will be
bought up by surplus dealers. Consumers will participate because it makes
eminent sense to upgrade an otherwise useless 128k Mac using third party
memory upgrades to bump it up to 2 or 4Mb  + SCSI for the same price or less
than Apple's upgrades to 1Mb. With the availbility of 800k drives, there will
be a demand for pirate ROMs.

Therefore, it looks like Apple should offer a "stripper" SE and allow the
Mac Plus to fade away.

Apple has become increasingly restricive with repair parts and upgrade
packages. A Macintosh is a very rationally designed machine, and much easier
to take apart and put togther than any PC with the possible exception of
the new IBM machines. Yet all PC compatible vendors allow and indeed expect
their customers to install peripheral cards, disk drives, etc. Only Apple
requires their customers to take their machines to a dealer (while, with
the other hand Apple grapples with the competency of dealer service shops)
and spend a highway robbery rates for someone with the right kind of
screwdriver to do what any child could do. Certainly if Mopar sells upgrade
cams for Dodge Onmis that come with videotape instrautions for end-user
installation, innovative Apple could come up with some way to let the 
self motivated among us to upgrade our Macs without spending money on a
possibly less competent person to do it for us.

-Zigurd