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From: dvorak@cs.utexas.edu (Dan Dvorak)
Newsgroups: alt.next,ut.general,comp.sys.mac,comp.misc,comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: NeXT press release (very long but interesting)
Summary: Price comparison of NeXT, Sun, Apple, & Compaq.
Message-ID: <3580@cs.utexas.eds:<
Date: 14 Oct 88 01:52:13 GMT
References: <5423@juniper.uucp>
Organization: U.Tx@Austin Dept of Computer Sciences
Lines: 28



The Wall Street Journal article on Steve Jobs' announcement
of the NeXT Computer System is on display on the wall outside
Taylor 5.114.  The earlier posting of the NeXT press release
in this newsgroup gave a more complete picture of the system's
technical features, but the Wall Street Journal article gives
an interesting price comparison to competitors' products, when
comparably equipped.  All the machines shown below have 8 MB
main memory and a large disk:

                       price   proc.   disk   monitor  operating sys.
                      -------  -----  ------  -------  --------------
NeXT Computer System   $6,500  68030  256 MB  17-inch  MACH  
Sun 386l/150          $16,990  80386  327 MB  15-inch  UNIX,MS-DOS
Apple Macintosh IIx   $13,862  68030  192 MB  19-inch  Apple *
Compaq 386 Model 300  $19,751  80386  300 MB  12-inch  (extra **)

*  Apple's A/UX UNIX is an additional $2,600.
** Compaq's UNIX is an additional $695.

The price difference is even more surprising given the large
amount of software bundled with NeXT -- things like Common Lisp,
Objective C, an SQL database server, a symbolic math program,
Display Postscript, and a dictionary and thesaurus.
-- 
Dan Dvorak          ARPA/CS/NSFnet:  dvorak@cs.utexas.eds
(512) 471-9576      UUCP:  ...!cs.utexas.edu!dvora