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From: rokicki@polya.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: NeXT
Message-ID: <4450@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 13 Oct 88 22:31:48 GMT
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 39

To calm the masses . . .

Yes, the NeXT machine has some nice features, but don't sell that
Amiga yet!  You see, the Amiga is a mass-market machine, with a
nice fat low-end market, and a fairly large middle market.

The NeXT machine will sell for $6500 up, which places it out of
reach of probably 90% of the Amigans.  Add to that the fact that
the machine will *not* be available for public purchase until
maybe midyear 1989.  Plus, the $6500 price is to selected
developers and educators *only*, and the public and commercial
price will probably be quite steeper.

The $2000 laser is the only supported printer, so if you want
hardcopy, well, there's some more money.  Not to mention a way
to get software *into* the machine.  (What, they are going to
distribute software on 20MB SCSI disks, or can you dismount your
system optical disk to load a distribution optical disk?)  And
many people might not like the access time or write time for
the optical floppy, so you might need that $2000 Winchester.

While NeXT comes with all sorts of neat software, it will most
certainly be a while before many mass-market applications are
ported.  Especially since NeXT is not targetting the mass market
yet.

And while the display is good, 8xx by 11xx isn't mindblowing,
and neither is two bitplanes of monochrome.  I don't know about
y'all, but VideoScape in grey is kind of boring.

Oh, and the 256K dedicated video RAM seems to make double
buffering impossible, at least with the current hardware.
So smooth animation might not be absolutely trivial.

I am not trying to lambast the NeXT machine.  I love it.  I'd
love to have one.  But at that price, I think I'll enjoy my
Amiga a little longer.

-tom