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From: davidl@leonardo.intel.com (David D. Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Bogus IIci review in Washington Post
Message-ID: <774@gandalf.littlei.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jan 90 17:52:50 GMT
Sender: news@littlei.UUCP
Organization: Intel IMSO Tech Pubs
Lines: 52

I just read an article entitled "Newest Macintosh Deserves Honors as First PC 
of the 1990s," which was forwarded to me from Compu$erve.  It was bylined "By 
T.R. Reid, Washington Post Staff Writer," so I assume it first appeared in
the Washington Post.

Reid begins by praising the IIci's speed: "Our resident programmer, Homer 
Reid, loaded in the estimable "MathCad" number-crunching program and gave it 
a complex function to perform. Our 80386 MS-DOS machine took about six hours 
to generate the first five solutions from this function. The Mac IIci 
generated 11 solutions within 15 seconds, and would have kept going if the 
answers hadn't run past the 14-digit limit of precision."  So far, so
good.


	   "The new Macintosh IIci shows how little regard computer makers
	pay to compatibility these days. Apple advertises that its new 
	computer is compatible with "virtually all Macintosh software." I 
	didn't find that true.  ....
	    "I found numerous Mac programs that wouldn't run on the IIci. It 
	was bad enough to get that maddening "bomb" icon, which means the 
	system has crashed.  Even worse, the computer sometimes crashed with a 
	program disk in the floppy drive. This is bad news, because Apple 
	forgot to put an "Eject" button on the floppy drive. You're supposed to 
	eject a disk through system software. But once the system crashes, 
	there's no way to get the unwanted disk out.
	    "As a result, when you hit the reset button after a crash, the Mac 
	sits there complaining about the alien disk in the floppy drive - but 
	provides no way to eject it. There is no worse feeling in all of 
	computerdom than the one that comes from sticking a screwdriver inside 
	your new $9,000 computer to pry a disk from the floppy drive just to 
	get the machine to boot up.
            "The Macintosh IIci, in summary, is an impressive power package 
	for those who need industrial-strength processing on a desktop. But 
	its high price and compatibility problems make it an unlikely upgrade 
	for current Mac owners."

On any other Mac I've used, if there's a floppy in the floppy drive at boot
time, either the machine successfully boots off of the floppy (in which
case you can eject it and reboot) or it puts up the little disk-with-an-X
and ejects it, then boots off the hard disk.  Is this a serious flaw in the
IIci, or is this T. R. Reid a bozo who couldn't wait the one second or so
it takes the machine to decide a disk isn't bootable and eject it?  (That 
mention of "sticking a screwdriver (!!!!) inside" to get the disk out implies 
the latter.)

Also, is compatibility as bad as Reid claims?  Judging by the lack of
traffic on this net on the subject, the IIci's compatibility seems to be as
good or better than any other new-architecture Mac so far.

- David D. Levine, Intel IMSO Tech Pubs
  davidl@leonardo.intel.com
  "I take a seven and a half."