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I wonder what would have happened if Steve Jobs priced Next products at the level that normal people could buy them.
by trimboffle 7y ago
I wonder what would have happened if Steve Jobs priced Next products at the level that normal people could buy them.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoI wonder what would have happened if Xerox priced Altos products at a level normal people could afford them.
- simonh 7y agoNeXT would have gone bust almost immediately.
- trimboffle 7y agoWhy?
- simonh 7y agoBecause they would have been operating at a loss. Unless they could magic down the cost of manufacturing their products, there's no way to magic down the price they had to charge customers.
- icedchai 7y agoNeXT operated at a loss for most of its life anyway, eventually got out of the hardware business entirely. See https://computerhistory.org/blog/next-steve-jobs-dot-com-ipo-that-never-happened/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/next-steve-jobs-dot-com-ipo...
- GeekyBear 7y agoJust the cost of that much RAM alone priced it out of the home market. At introduction, a Xerox Alto would cost $100,000 to build in today's dollars according to Wikipedia, so prices were trending down at the time, but were still enormous.
- carlesfe 7y agoNext products, by design, were workstations, and they were priced accordingly. They were not targeted at the normal consumer.
- icelancer 7y agoHe couldn't. That was always the intention, but his vision outraced the technology : cost curve.
- protomyth 7y agoTo give a bit of historical perspective, the Macintosh IIfx was priced at $9,869 USD for 4 MB memory & 80 MB HDD in 1990. The NeXTcube was not out of line for the class of machine it was. Also, I remember someone telling me that Adobe did charge a fair bit for their Display Postscript. I actually think one of the biggest problems was charging so damn much for the developer tools and their retail picks were less than helpful. I got a copy of NeXTSTEP 3.3 and 4.0 with the developer tools and had a Microway server speced to run it (90MHz Pentium). It was way more fun and productive than any other machine and that includes the BeOS which was nice but felt a bit unfinished. The manuals were amazing and I wish Apple still knew how to do documentation as well as NeXT did.
- goatinaboat 7y agoIt was also the case that Jobs was reluctant to sell them to the businesses that could afford them and easily justify the cost in enhanced productivity such as investment banks. He wanted to sell them to education at a time Sun was using some of their profits from banks to sell to education at a discount. A superbly effective strategy for Sun for many years.