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

To: Zen Dollar Round who wrote (13014)	5/7/1998 1:01:00 AM
From: Scott Crumley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213177

Roy, - Speaking of Ethernet, why does the average consumer have any need for it? The cost to include 10/100BaseT Ethernet could have been foregone for a floppy drive, Zip drive, or both! Best thing Apple could do is offer Ethernet in a BTO config, not as standard equipment. I'm looking at the 100 base T as more of a clue than an engineering screw up. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think we should put on our thinking caps here and explore the possibilities. Maybe it's something like soup suggested, positioning the imac as a cheap client around a Rhapsody server. Maybe it's something else that will be tied with the imac in the next 90 days. This is a product that has been developed in the last 10 months, by a bunch of very bright, foreward thinking people. There's a lot of bright people on this thread. Let's see what we can come up with. Regards, Scott

To: Zen Dollar Round who wrote (13014)	5/7/1998 4:48:00 AM
From: HerbVic	Respond to of 213177

Roy, I hear what you are saying, and feel that there will be quite a few who will echo the sentiment. My own personal attitude is that the floppy is long obsolete and I applaud Apple for taking a stand to rid us of it. Other that the fact that program and file sizes have completely outgrown them, there is the matter of reliability. A 1.44 mb floppy is not a good safe place to store important backups. They easily corrupt themselves over time without even being moved from their containers. And they are s.l.o.w. As one who has upgraded from local talk to ethernet, I'll concede that if there is much added cost involved, the home user would probably opt for the cheaper connection since he may only rarely use it. But if I was designing a computer, and wanted to standardize on one networking solution or the other, and the cost was the same or nominal due to board level integration, the faster connection is the obvious choice. The modem's the thing. Everyone always brings up the modems! Vy mus de all-veys bring up the ovens... upt.. modems! Well it's quite simple really. It should have been 56kbps. Though the truth of the matter is that most phone lines max out at around 26kbps, and by the time the lines catch up to modem speeds, we'll all be using something else. Cable modems, ISDN, [insert favorite technology here]. I think that the modem circuit is probably another board level integration implemented in software. It will deliver to the casual user. The juice user will have to use that ethernet connection for a cable modem. I own an ISDN modem, which I enjoyed cheaply in Tennessee. Here in Texas and in Arkansas the telephone service costs for ISDN are prohibitive. So, I'm stuck with one of those 28.8kbps modems. It's OK. The internet is slower than the modem most of the time. So you buy the hot new computer that is internet ready for $1299 brand new. When you order software, the package contains a CD ROM now with instructions on how to request disks. Now you don't have to bother. You save your files on the hard drive, and back up to the internet or some other device hooked to the computer. It's all relative. HerbVic