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

To: Doren who wrote (9824)	3/21/1998 9:01:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Doren, We are seeing the war between Gas(Wintel) and Steam (Apple), the steam cars in the past were far better than the gas ones , faster and all. But they took longer to warm up(flashboilers helped) and cost more money (and also were prone to explosions) and they lost to gasoline. So the Apple is faster and better, it costs more, and often the schools have one budget to buy and that one wants the most machines and they use another to operate it and they put up with the down times as they have the employees already and there is no extra costs, just a lower up ratio, and they move machines around so there downs are not in class. A friend of mine runs a high school computer classroom based on NT and he has a very good up ratio. The software "rats" on the students if they make a crash, they know this and do not do it. He has no problems and would not buy Apples due to fewer programs and fewer machines. Even the Apple head office incentives do not make much headway against screwdriver shop machines, but the Dells are easy to beat, lots of fat in a Dell, a screwdriver shop can easily beat a Dell by 30-35% and have a standard upgradeable box(motherboard changeable) that will beat the Dell. Schools get software deals from the vendors as they want the kids on their stuff, so the Dell suite of thrown in software has small value. As in cars, where a grand consolidation was brought about by the recession and assembly line tech and 3000 individual cars makers went out of business(mainly carriage makers who bolted engines in) as the GM/FORD duopoly enveloped them all, it will be in computers. but the small speed shop will endure selling thrush mufflers for cars, or CPU extra speed modules for computers, but the big box sellers will soon be king. I suspect that the sales tax edge will get closed too. Where you can buy out of state tax free but the local seller charges you 6-8% sales tax. This easily overcomes freight extras. States will probably see a levelling of the playing field with an interstate sales tax levy that will get split between the ship state and the receive state and the feds in some way. The states will like it as they now get nada. The mail order houses will scream, let them. Have you ever noticed they locate just outside California state lines and sell mostly in Ca. same for many other MO houses, they locate in a state where they will do minimal business, even a zero sales tax state(is there one?, we have them in Canada but we also have federal tax of 7% on all stuff, it totals 15% in Ontario(sales and Fed sales tax). What a killer of business. In addition The city of Toronto wants to place an 11% annual business tax on manufacturers in Toronto based on building full retail value. That will make them all leave in about 6 months and soon after that the city will own the buildings, like Newark. Perhaps computers will get so good we just ask them to do something like a brilliant private secretary. In the same way that all aspects of humanity in the mechanical sense have been beaten by machines(run faster with a bike etc) we can now see further and compute faster and when full speech comprehension and synthetic response are here we will soon have such a machine. I would say 2-3 years. Dragon Dictate, latest version is around 95-98% perfect on continuous speech, and when dumped in to a word processor and spell checked all you need to look for are homonymic errors, and perfectly spelled wrongly placed words. The only things I hate is you feel dry in the mouth after 2 hours of dictation, and for short stuff it is easier to type. Needs at least a 233 Pentium. In 1-2 years it will get near perfect, when they have 500-700 Mhz processors. I wonder if it could be done for the G3 series as the faster speed would help it. Those integraph boxes are way overpriced and Wun Hung Low can make the same box for a lot less from off the shelf parts. I think Integraph is a marketing scheme to prey on graphics people, they probably make a good living as their clients are not knowledgeable in WIntel areas. As they say, build the ultimate machine, ask the ultimate question "is there a god", answer "there is now" Bill