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

To: WebDrone who wrote (23266)	2/25/1999 6:01:00 PM
From: Adam Nash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

The new blue G3's are for department level machines, not for power users or SOHO. I feel left out, too. And, no USB port on Powerbook tops it all off. A power user would just buy the USB PC Card with ADB power pass-through. I'm planning to buy one as soon as they release the cool Gravis USB Gamepad I saw at Macworld, for Virtual Game Station, of course. - Adam

To: WebDrone who wrote (23266)	2/28/1999 6:58:00 PM
From: Doren	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 213173

The new blue G3's are for department level machines, not for power users or SOHO. I feel left out, too Our lab just got a bunch of 300Mhz Blue G3s. So I've had a chance to use them. I've also been using an older 8600/300 and my home machine is an 8500 with a 220/110 upgrade card. I hate to be the bearer of bad news as I really want to see competition in the market place and Wintel sucks. But... It seems like these machines are neither as fast or as stable as one would expect. The CPU performance is great but the FPU leaves something to be desired. At the moment the 9600/350s still look like superior machines, hence their APPRECIATION in value from the $1700 they were selling at to the $2700 that they are now worth. Netscape, 4.06 in particular, takes at least 3Xs as long to load as it does on the other machines I'm using. The internal Zips are a constant pain in our lab, with I would guess a 50% failure rate. And Jobs instance on secrecy, even to the 3rd party manufacturers has made SCSI and Firewire problematic at best, not to mention the modem problems. The G3s do some things faster, but by and large the incremental upgrade that they represent from the previous machines is not compelling enough for me to buy one at the prices they want. Actually I'm going to try to hold off at any price. I'm still interested in the G4s which should have much better FPU performance. I hope they are what they should be and I hope they are on time. The system upgrades have been similarly problematic. Although they've changed some things for the better. In my personal opinion the system 8.1 upgrade was slower than 7.6 and the lack of global folder views really sucked. Yes, I know you can get a control panels that solves this problem, but more 3rd party control panel and extensions = more crashes. System 8.5 is better, it is faster but the HFS+ bugs and other Hard Drive problems have made me wary of upgrading. Not for financial reason but because the hassle of installing and stabilizing a new system reminds me of what it's like to work with Wintel. Work is the operative word here, you can't get anything done if your machine is constantly crashing or your new sound card won't work. Again I'm trying to hold off until 8.6.1 is available. I do think Apple is trying hard and making hard decisions, but like all huge companies they are becoming more and more distanced from their core users. I'd gladly trade the pretty blue cases for stability, speed and room for an extra removable drive. The pretty colored iMac cases make sense for the average dabbler, but the round cases only get in the way on a pro machine. The good news is that strategically, Apple is looking good. Quick time and ColorSync are gems. Firewire sounds good, if the 3rd party people can get it to work well. The adoption of OpenGL was agonizingly late but better late than never. IDE drives and standard RAM are good in theory. The bad news is that quality control has suffered badly in the past couple of years, to the point that parity with Wintel machines is too close for comfort. Macs crash more, and plug and play is not as good as it used to be. IDE drives are cheaper but Apple puts in slow very cheap drives. USB is better than ADB but Apple is pulling a public relations hoax about it's speed. USB is slowwwwww. Cross your fingers. doren