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To: Mary Cluney who wrote (38606)	11/1/1997 3:37:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Mary - Re: "When the media talks about a sub $1000 computer, they are not really talking about a computer system that costs less than $1000. They are talking about a market, for the most part, that consists of people who are penny wise and dollar foolish. Most of these people will end up paying closer to $2000 than $1000 after getting a monitor, modem, printer, sound cards, software, et al. After spending close to $2000 most of these people will find they will need more. After all, who would rather spend $2000 for something that they could get for $1000. My point is you can't do it for less than $1000. Sometimes cheap is expensive. " This is a very clear perspective on what that market is. Thanks for putting it in such clear terms. It will be interesting to see what happens to today's buyers of $1000 machines in about 18 months or so. I'll bet they upgrade to the NEW sub $1000 machines at that time! (Which they could buy today for <<$2000!) Paul

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (38606)	11/3/1997 1:06:00 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Mary, They are talking about a market, for the most part, that consists of people who are penny wise and dollar foolish. The computer system that you truly lust for will always cost more than $5000. I think you are way off. First of all, even $1,000 is a lot of money for 90% of this planet. It's something they have to save for. Second of all, you can get more than enough performance for under $1,000 for most normal applications. You just have to buy a Computer Shopper and browse. You will see for yourself. Actually, if you really want to an impact from a dollar spent, spend it on the monitor. You can get the top of the line for $1,500 to $1,750. The rest of the system is mostly just sitting in idle. Try this. Start the system monitor of Windows 95 and watch it. Your CPU utilization will be mostly in 5-15%. If you want to spend a lot on the hard drive, you can spend $1,000 on Seagate Cheetah, but it will mostly be sitting idle as well if you bought enough of cheap RAM, that gives you 1,000 times better performace than disk access for data sitting in the cache. IDE will do the trick for a typical user. Plus 32 to 64 MB of RAM. If you are at work, accessing data from the network, the chances are that your network is 10 Mbit/s Ethernet. I just ran a test, and single workstation (Cyrix 6x86-200 - $65) can flood the network with so many pockets that the bandwith of the network becomes the limitation. In this particular case, the file server (Pentium classic 100) had a CPU utilization of 15%, while the network bandwith was maxed out. Suppose we "upgrade" the file server to Pentium-II 300. What would we gain? Minimum performance gain. The only result would be that the CPU utilization would go down to about 7%. So instead of wasting 85% of the performance, we would be wasting 93% If you want more performance, you can get if by going to 100 Mbit/s ethernet. There will always be a market for a Mercedes, but will there always be a market for a Yugo - even though it could get you from A to B - most of the time? I agree partially. You think that $1,000 is a Yugo. I think it's a Chevy. A Yugo to me are the $499 computers. Mercedes (without a monitor) is about $1,500. If you are spending more, you are buying a tank. Even though it is capable of driving through walls, has a gun to fire at things, chances are, you will never use those features. Joe