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

To: Alomex who wrote (10035)	3/25/1998 10:37:00 AM
From: Russ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Artemis pictures and specs available at macnn.com Says the base price will be $1499, top end will be $1999. Yes, it's a nice machine, and a 233 MHz G3 will out perform a 300 MHz P II, but isn't the price of $1499 too high for the market? Whatever happened to sub 1K? -Russ

To: Alomex who wrote (10035)	3/25/1998 8:39:00 PM
From: soup	Respond to of 213173

Street Fighting Man. >Soup, since you are the man on the street, can you give us some intel(ligence) on where are the sales of Macs compared to last year?< Alomex; Our store's a tough example. First, we're more focused on service and repair but we do sell new, used, factory reconditioned Macs including everything from SEs and Classics to clones to G3's. Because we recyle so many old machines, we probably cost AAPL some volume on the low/mid end. Also, because so much of our perspective buyers indicate they want to do Photoshop or Video or direct-to-disk audio, I rarely recommend the current G3 lineup, citing the CPU having only 3 RAM slots (I consider 160mb a minimum for Photoshop) and IDE hard drives (too slow for audio/video and too unreliable for anything else.) I'm fairly successful selling 7300/8600/9600s and telling them to upgrade to a G3 processor 3-6 months hence when the prices drop. Just today, I had a guy wanting to trade his G3 because it wouldn't work DigiDesign Performer (music). We worked through the cost of the cheapest 9500 we could find and throwing in a G3 and AV hard drive. (I was tempted to trade him my 9500 but didn't.) So while we aren't selling the new stuff, we're definitely doing our part to prop up pricing on the older inventory. :) Regarding your original question, I have no hard year-to-year data. But: * I do get a lot of calls inquiring about G3s. * Far fewer customers are asking if AAPL is going under. (This was an all-but-inevitable question asked in the context of CPU purchases last year.) FYI, my stock answer was that AAPL had more cash in the bank than Philip Morris; cutting edge techology in many areas and a $150 million investment/100+ person commitment from MSFT to develop Mac software. And even if AAPL went out of business today, whole cottage industries would spring up to support the 26 million world-wide user base. Now, I just mention that AAPL's stock has doubled since Jan 1. :) soup P.S. Just had customers pick up the last two Newton 2100's I could lay my hands on. Charged them $50 over list price because my cost was high. (I was buying from another retailer who had five left earlier in the day.) AAPL's certainly not taking a charge to get rid of this inventory. Go figure.