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

To: HerbVic who wrote (13974)	5/22/1998 9:17:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Herbvic, I remember the good old days with lots of dealers. When things got tight many dealers started to sell WIntels along with Apples and when Apple threatened to cut them off, some quit and some sued. It was eventually ruled that you cannot do that and there are a number of dealers selling Apples and WIntels now. Another aspect is the share shrinkage meant that unless a dealer was in a major city there would not be enough sales for him to survive on. Many pioneering small dealers in smaller centers stopped Apple sales this way, especially after the ban on mail order sales came in. Another funny aspect was the price structure that kept getting cheaper the more you bought . So a dealer might get 25% off for 1-24 units and 28% off for 25-49 units and 29% for 50-249 units and 30% off for 250-499 units and 31% off for over 500 units.(actual % and break pints not known). This led to dealer syndicates that would break a shipment of 500 units among 10-20 dealers, who would then all get 31% off(less the freight from the initial ship to point). This then led to the dealers dealing with devils(mail order houses) to get rid of their share of the 500 as the next 500 were on the truck, and then the MO houses engaged in competition and the rest you know. Obviously Apple should have had a constant,say 28% off, for all levels and for all dealers. But Apple was also driven by the need to move numbers as this occurred while the WIntels were growing and squeezing Apples share , and so marketing and distribution errors were made. Such deeper and deeper discounts are common in the sugar water trade and I wonder why Apple got into them, it obviously engendered inter dealer strife and hurt Apple in the long run. Same thing happened with Wintel parts. I used to make 200 286 motherboards(XT) per month and I had a purchase contract with Intel for 200 chip sets per month. Soon you could buy a fully populated motherboard from Taiwan for less than what I was paying for the shipsets. So I bought Taiwan boards. The Taiwanese had formed a monster sybdicate and were buying a million chip sets per month. Intel was a monopoly and could have had a flat price profile. If they had there would be many more US PC makers. Apparently it is illegal for US makers to form such syndicates to buy parts together, and the chip makers then export the jobs. Bill

To: HerbVic who wrote (13974)	5/23/1998 12:53:00 AM
From: J R KARY	Respond to of 213177

iMAC ships August '98 , AAPL to join a Wintel USB software group Where , oh where is Rhapsody , or why , oh why did you kill Rhapsody ? UNIX popping up again with the requirement for USB drivers to support August's iMAC : " Refusing to concede the server market to Intel and Microsoft, major Unix software vendors are joining forces in an attempt to add some of Windows NT's simplicity, such as a hot-pluggable interface for peripherals, to their own variants of the Unix operating system ... Apple, which offers USB as the sole interface in its new iMac low-cost computer, is not yet a member of the group but is considering hooking up with its fellow Wintel opponents... Apple will deliver iMac, a "USB-only" system, in August, ... Apple also will build USB into "a variety of future products," Shebanek (WW Prod. Mgr.) said. USB support is built into the Mac OS reference release scheduled for this fall and into Mac OS X (which stands for Version 10), he added. With iMAC due in August , and MacOS USB support not due to later in the Fall , do you believe Rhapsody/UNIX was "murdered" by its originator 5/11/98 ? Jim K. Source: infoworld.com