There is no way you could get me to buy a Macintosh today, but when I was a kid I saw that 1984 SuperBowl commercial and I had to have a Mac. The camera shop where I bought my Apple II finally got some in and that Mac was mine — until my parents saw the price tag.
Nothing has changed since then, with Apple’s latest machine, the Apple Cube, being more of the same. Charles Haddad writes in Business Week that he’s Rethinking the Cube.
I don’t usually keep up with new hardware introductions by Apple and this is exactly why. Okay, for $1,800 the sucker (er…consumer) gets a G4 450 mhz processor with a whopping 64 megabytes of RAM, an anemic 20 gig hard drive, no PCI slots, and port connectors on the bottom of the machine.
Even Apple’s alleged entry level consumer computer, the iMac, is overpriced. In March, for example, Apple released the iMac 350. For $1,000 you could get a 350mhz processor with a whopping 64 mb of memory and a 6 gig hard drive. Compared to what you could buy (or better yet build — which is simply not an option with Apple) on the Intel/AMD side of things, this is a ridiculous price for that featureset.
Source:
Rethinking the Cube. Charles Haddad, BusinessWeek, September 6, 2000.