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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: soup who wrote (8049)	1/29/1998 11:27:00 AM
From: David Kuspa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

I haven't seen any recent price/performance comparisons between the latest Wintel and PowerPC platforms. For a while there, the PowerPC actually seemed to have a price/performance advantage, but reading about the latest Pentium IIs and the sub-$1,000 offerings has me beginning to feel those (hardware and wallet only!) Wintel-envies again. >>Gateway 2000 will release the GP-6, a full-featured PC aimed at small business users. Along with the 333-MHz Pentium II, the system will feature a 19-inch monitor, a 8.4GB hard disk drive, 64MB of memory, a CD-ROM drive, and Windows NT for $2,899. In the past, systems like this--the cream of the PC crop--have been introduced at prices exceeding $4,500, and more often $5,000. Gateway is also cutting prices on some models up to 21 percent. Its Destination PC-TV convergence product will drop to a much more affordable level of $2,499, with a DVD drive. These fancy computers come with extra-large screens and a panoply of high-end features. To date, they have been priced out of the reach of most consumers, typically above $4,000. The price reductions also have moved Gateway's E-1000 business PCs for networked environments below $1,000, including monitor. For home buyers, Gateway has now has a fully configured Pentium II 266-MHz multi-media system under $2,000. Compaq, meanwhile, is expected to hit new pricing lows for its high-end Pentium II consumer systems. The Presario model will come with a DVD drive, 48MB of memory, an 8GB hard drive, and a 56-kbps modem. It is expected to carry a suggested retail price of between $2,000 and $2,500. The No.1 PC vendor is also slated to come out with a Deskpro business PC with a 333-MHz Pentium II.<< news.com Can anyone post SPEC benchmarks for the current crop of Wintel and PowerPC chips out there so we know where we stand? FWIW, I believe one of the most significant factors in Apple's profit margin improvement was that they decided to sell the G3 chips at a premium even though they cost a lot less to make than the older 604 line. Aren't these G3 chips the size of a fingernail? Reducing the size of a chip and its "line width" lowers the cost of production. Along with their greater volume, that's how Intel has managed to drop the price of its Pentium IIs to 1/3 of what they originally sold for, by moving to a smaller die size and line width. I remember an Apple rep telling me at a trade show that "the days of the $4,000 computer as we know it are over"--that was 3 years ago. Yet Apple is still stuck primarily in a $2,900-$5,000 market segment when the Wintel camp is aiming at $1,000-$2,900. Are we slipping behind again? D. Kuspa