An American perspective on the late great Sir Clive Sinclair, from Fast Company

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Wed Sep 29 10:37:17 CDT 2021


On Mon, 27 Sept 2021 at 22:49, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
>
> I think that it is truly tragic about the price gouging.

Strongly agreed.

The TI-99/4A wasn't a great computer, with foolish design compromises,
but it was driven out of the market by unfair pricing.

The Amiga was a superior machine in almost every way to the Atari ST,
and should have been a bit more expensive -- I'm sure it was to
produce. But no, another price war.

And so on.

> A number of people have commented that computers were sold as if the
> exchange rate was 1:1!

Yup. But that was probably me.  A computer that sold for $1000
> would be sold in UK for 1000 GBP! (the equivalent of $3000)

Yup. A particular habit of Apple, to be fair, but not unique to them.
Also, the US cost of living is substantially cheaper -- e.g. gasoline.

Today the average US price is €0.80 per litre.
EU average is about c€1.40 per litre.

Source:
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/USA/gasoline_prices/
https://www.tolls.eu/fuel-prices

>  How much did the TRS80 sell for in UK?

Which model?

They were pretty rare here -- I don't think I ever saw a single one
anywhere outside Tandy store display units.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5791/was-the-trs-80-model-1-ever-actually-sold-new-with-that-name

Model I, 4K Level I: £385.25
Model I, 16K Level II: £546.25

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