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

To: Dave Gore who wrote (13098)	5/7/1998 3:03:00 PM
From: Scott Crumley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

This is from macosrumors.com: Clearly, the hottest issue of the day is the expandability of this new, inexpensive, high-speed machine Apple will be releasing this summer. The iMac includes features that will run you several hundred dollars more than its current price, and speed that will cost you two and a half times the system's $1299 price tag. Many readers have written in with concern over the apparent lack of external SCSI, PCI slots, or a floppy drive. So, we dialed up a few of the people who'd only been at liberty to call the iMac by its other name, "Steve's Baby." (Once confused with AMP, this little box had been sitting right under our noses for some time). Finally, we got a few straight answers from one extremely reliable source. "The feature set of the 'i' isn't complete yet. There could very easily be changes between now and August (if you believe that timeline). However, right now, it is expansionless with the exception of its USB ports....which we'll be announcing some cool products for in the future, like the USB floppy the boys in hardware dev are playing with. Do you know why that is?" We didn't, so Tron (not his real name) -- talking to us from the infamous Leaky Phone Booth at a popular Apple employee hangout (Space Paranoids, eat your hearts out) -- told us. "Steve's grunts put this thing in front of a half-dozen focus groups and asked them what they'd like to see in it. Virtually 100% of the time, people who didn't already own a computer or had a budget under $1500 -- the only people we're really trying to reach with this box, everyone else should be waiting for the Gossamer II G3s, which have a few surprises of their own -- people wanted low cost, fast graphics, a fast processor, and compatible connectivity (USB). All else was secondary. So we gave them what they wanted." So, we asked, what was Apple doing for people who wanted something with more expansion? "Watch Steve between now and August. Gossamer II's first appearance should be around the release of the iMac, or soon after. I haven't seen it in a case, but suffice it to say it's everything PowerExpress was, at half the cost and with USB and all kinds of other cool stuff PEx never had. iMac isn't for the geeks. It's for the people who bought a Mac 128k because it was cool, because it was easy, and because it was (at the time) priced for a home user. If the geeks are worried about limitations, they can spend a couple hundred more on desktop G3 and get their PCI slots. 'The rest of us,' the other 70% of the population of the world, probably will never use them anyway and would rather get a cheaper, faster, cooler, more compatible box in a heartbeat."