--- On Mon, 3/8/10, engel <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: engel <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [SPAM] Re: Mac Plus: What's it Worth?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Monday, March 8, 2010, 12:01 AM
> Mac128 wrote:
> > Take it very seriously. Have you ever known Apple to
> admit any flaws
> > or defects until their feet were held to the fire?
> yes,
> AC adapters of wallstreet was recalled and replaced free of
> charge with yoyo ...
> btw, they did a mistake and sent two yoyo and still I have
> the original one!
> Angelo
How about the early MagSafe power connectors? No power plug to get ripped off
the logic board when someone trips over the cable, but might melt and turn
brown and just about catch fire. I bet there were cost discussions about how
large to make the contact pads and magnets - and what they chose was just a bit
too small to handle the load.
With as many poor engineering decisions as Apple has made over the years, plus
some whopping bloody awful business decisions (such as killing off Unitron in
Brazil instead of licensing the company to build Macs there until the country
opened to computer imports in 1992), it's amazing the company has survived.
The Apple III and the Lisa were over-expensive oddities that cost Apple a lot
of money. The Cube likely was a loss or barely broke even. The Macbook Air has
utterly failed to take a significant chunk of the Netbook market, but Apple has
forged ahead with a second version - still with only one USB port and the mini
DisplayPort.
I know Apple had a "Super Cube" in the works. A person who worked at Micron's
memory compatibility testing lab told me about it after it was canceled. He'd
had the job of doing testing on some engineering samples. Unlike the original
Cube, the Super Cube's samples had a non-working DIMM slot which would've
needed more work by Apple to fix the problem for production. The original
Cube's production model was identical to its engineering samples. Sooo, more
money sunk into a Cube Mark 2 that never saw the light of day.
Apple's also spent big money on many other products that got very close to
production. The "Power Express" would've been the Mac with the most features
ever, the only one with built in Wide SCSI, only to be chopped at the last
minute in favor of the stripped down 3 PCI slot Beige G3. (And legions of
9500/9600 owners screamed in agony... then bought G3 and later G4 upgrade cards
to keep their 6 PCI slots.)
We all know about the "road Apple" 63xx series with its design flaws. :P
The Macintosh TV. Epic FAIL at computer/multimedia integration. Apparently the
team on that was locked in a room and never saw what the PC world was doing
with picture-in-picture TV cards and motion video capture, even if it was only
low resolution - and with no utterly silly 8 megabyte RAM limits.
Another thing that's hurt Apple many times was its self-convincing that certain
of its products would cannibalize sales from its higher end products. The IIsi
and LC and LC II were deliberately hobbled so they wouldn't take sales away
from the IIci and other top-line Macs. What happened was the cheaper line's
sales ended up less than they could have been once word got out on their
limitations. Think on how many more IIsi, LC and LC II might have been sold
without things like the IIsi being cut to 20Mhz and the artificial RAM size
limits on the LCs. They were still 'cut down' enough so that nobody wanting the
power and expansion of the more expensive models would've chosen the cheaper
one.
What's saved Apple from itself is that its hits have been really big and
successful ones. The good stuff makes up for the bad, but there should've been
so much less of the bad.
--
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