31 Oct
2001
31 Oct
'01
9:38 a.m.
While I always liked the 6502, and while I admired the
Apple people's
inclination to use software to do what others did with hardware, I never liked
the fact that they (Apple) were always happy to compromise on both performance
and reliability, even on much more recent hardware, e.g. the early MAC's, in
order to make money. They routinely left out lostf of hardware,
using firmware
or software to replace it, resulting in lower CPU throughput, yet charged more
than their competitors who put the hardware "in there" and delivered the
performance.
I can appreciate a good minimalistic approach to something
and I used to look at the compact Macs as little more than expensive
toys, but Apple has shown on numerous occasions that it isn't afraid
to go out on a limb in order to push the technology further. They've
had, and continue to have, some revolutionary ideas but at the same
time they've also had their share of huge flops. Macs in the
mid-90's were horrendous in a lot of respects, which is why the
company nearly went under. It was being run for the sake of the
almighty $$$ return, as you already mentioned. Now it's to the point
where everyone expects Jobs to introduce something huge at each Mac
Expo. Few companies have managed the turn around Apple did, much
less tech. companies. They go by a totally different set of rules
and ideas than the machine assemblers such as Dell and Gateway. As
for performance, there's more to it than just the clock speed
numbers. There's not been a thing yet I've tossed at this G3/450
that it couldn't do, including all the emulation of various machines
I like to try.
BTW, on a different note, I've finally finished rebuilding my
Amiga 3000! It's even on our LAN and working great!
Jeff
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