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Notice all the emphasis on how the Mac would benefit from being $1500, significantly cheaper than many other machines of the era, even Apple //. Macintosh inst
by mapgrep 8y ago
Notice all the emphasis on how the Mac would benefit from being $1500, significantly cheaper than many other machines of the era, even Apple //.
Macintosh instead debuted at $2495 — considered by many in hindsight a big mistake. The much more usable version with 512k(vs 128k) was north of $3000. This is all in 1980s dollars, too.
(IIRC the launch of Mac coincided with a spike in RAM prices.)
- stmw 8y agoThe theme of price points was a recurring one, although it's not clear if $1500 was really an good faith projection, or just an attempt to position internally versus the bigger Lisa project?
- joezydeco 8y agoHere's Andy Hertzfeld's view of how the Mac pricing evolved: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Price_Fight.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
- mapgrep 8y agoI had no idea that a $50 cost overrun on a disk drive pushed them up $500 to $1995! Not sure I agree with the logic there. Then it seems to have been one bad executive call from there to $2495 (thanks, Sculley). So you could argue (it's a stretch!) that the $50 drive price increase ended up driving the price up $1000.
- joezydeco 8y agoWell, read that sentence again... "When combined with a few other recent splurges, it pushed us over the top, so we grudgingly accepted that the Macintosh would have to debut for $1995." What those other "splurges" are is unclear.