As the Apple Turns: Scene 555: Cheaper Than Paint (3/21/98)

Cheaper Than Paint (3/21/98)

Not that we want to impugn Mac the Knife's sobriety (as if that were humanly possible), but we strongly suspect that the edged implement sampled one too many of the local colorful delicacies during his Seybold trip to New York. The Knife first reveals that Apple's upcoming consumer-level machine will cost less than $1000 including a monitor, which is something we've all been hearing from multiple sources for a long time. Nothing too off-the-wall there. But then he goes on to say that Apple's paying only $20 per 266 MHz G3 chip.

$20 for a G3 266?! And no, it's not a typo caused by his convention-inspired intoxication and missed by his probably similarly-inebriated editors; he goes on to state that since that price is so low, Apple's trying to craft a complete motherboard for these low-end systems that includes video and a 266 MHz G3 all for under $100. Even if these particular G3's are the lower-end 740's with zero backside cache, we just can't believe that a 266 MHz version in any volume could cost less than dinner and a movie for one. Heck, does anyone want to sell us a 266 MHz G3 for $20? We're willing to forgo the evening's trek to Buddha's Delight and the midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show to scrape up the cash.

In fact, we'll even toss in our old 200 MHz 604e to sweeten the deal. Any takers? In the meantime, we hope the Knife suffers relatively few indignities as he dries out in the drunk tank...

SceneLink (555)

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The above scene was taken from the 3/21/98 episode:

March 21, 1998: Mac the Knife's had one too many during his Seybold jaunt in NYC, and is hallucinating $20 G3's. Meanwhile, Microsoft sponsors HP's latest move to contaminate Java in embedded systems, and there's a sweet quad-G3 system available for $4500, but you have to give up your favorite OS to use it...

Other scenes from that episode:

556: 94% Pure Java (3/21/98) The nightmare just never ends for Java. The latest blow comes from Hewlett-Packard, who, rather than license Sun's Java virtual machine for embedded systems, decided instead to build their own from the ground up and license it to others at a lower price than Sun charges for the "official" version...
557: Dreaming Again (3/21/98) Quick little fantasy bit: Next time you're sitting around daydreaming about the Mac you'd like sitting on your desk, consider a system sporting four 300 MHz G3 processors, each with a 1 MB backside cache, running on a 100 MHz system bus with 66 MHz PCI Ultra II SCSI, an 8MB graphics card, and fast ethernet...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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