Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!oz.cis.ohio-state.edu!jgreely From: jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: $1000 68040-NeXT (was Re: NEXT and the 68040?) Message-ID: Date: 11 Mar 90 23:21:43 GMT References: <7910@tank.uchicago.edu> <8255@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <11036@june.cs.washington.edu> <1990Mar10.033031.6151@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu> <1990Mar11.024125.7409@cs.umn.edu> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: J Greely Followup-To: comp.sys.next Distribution: usa Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 32 In-reply-to: rantapaa@cs.umn.edu's message of 11 Mar 90 02:41:25 GMT (aside: did you edit that followup-to by hand, or is your news software completely braindead? If the latter, it *needs* fixed. If the former, RTFM) In article <1990Mar11.024125.7409@cs.umn.edu> rantapaa@cs.umn.edu (Erik E. Rantapaa) writes: >I heard from a reliable source that NeXT is planning to come out with a >68040 version of the cube for around a thousand bucks. Sorry, I don't buy that one. An *upgrade* for existing machines, sure, but a whole new cube? Naaah. >Apparently they have got manufacturing costs low enough with their >automated factory so that they can stamp them out for a fraction of >that price. I'm not sure what you'll get, but even a bare cube with >1M memory and OD would be very attractive. 1 meg would be unusable, and they're not selling unusable machines (after all, they shipped free 40 meg SCSI drives to all OD-only purchasers, when they realized that that configuration was borderline under 1.0). Another point to consider is that they don't (I'm fairly sure) manufacture the optical drives in-house, so their automated factory can't have much effect on the cost of including one. Just running down the university/developer price list convinces me that they're not going to be able to drop their price that low *and* include a faster chip. Of course, if they *could* they'd actually have a chance at taking a large market share, but they'd have to change their marketing strategy. -- J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)