Message-ID: <223@eneevax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Jan-85 18:25:22 EST
Article-I.D.: eneevax.223
Posted: Wed Jan 16 18:25:22 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Jan-85 01:38:02 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Maryland, EE Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 46
Xref: watmath net.micro.atari:577 net.micro.mac:383

Now that we have a fairly good idea of the features and price
of the new 68000 atari machines, we can compare them and see
if it will put some price pressure on the mac.

The basic mac has a 512x342 bitmapped display,internal disk
drive and 128k plus a mouse and a couple of high speed serial
ports and an applebus local network interface.  The lowest
advertised price I have seen is about $1400 for this basic
configuration.  There are also rumors that apple may drop
this by another few hundred dollars so we can assume that the
price will be around $1200 by the time atari ships it's
machines.  The 512k upgrade is about $1000.

The equivalent atari configuration would be  the basic
machine + mouse for $500 plus $200 for a disk drive and
another $150  for a high res monochrome monitor, for a total
of $850. The atari has a little higher resolution 640x400.
I am assuming the most common configuration is with a
monochrome monitor.

So the mac will be about $350 more than a similarly configured
atari. This is not such a huge difference and probably won't
force apple to lower it's price as it can claim a "large"
software base and a machine that is of professional quality
with support vs atari's marketing it to zero support people
like kmart and toys r us. However, the 512k upgrade will
probably be much cheaper since atari's is only $200 more than
the base machine. Whether apple could maintain this position
depends solely on the quality or percieved quality of atari's
machine. A repeat of commodore's problem with the c64 would
probably spell disaster. If atari can grab a reasonable
market share I think they can only get better since they
have a few additional features such as color, a fast hard
disk interface with dma, no wait state memory at 8Mhz vs
the equivalent 4Mhz for apple because of display refreshing,
3 voice synthesizer that will eventually be upgraded to
16 independent voices and a midi interface. Of course apple
won't be sitting idly by, but it should make for an interesting
year with commodore jumping into the fray with their amiga
machine later in the year. Atari has another machine in the
works using the (rumored) 32032 that would bring the equivalent
of a sun workstation to the home. If that really happened
the entire micro market would be thrown into confusion.
-- 
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