Comments (flame) about lack of 3/50 memory upgrade

[Bob Sutterfield]

In article <2153 at kalliope.rice.edu> bernhold at qtp.ufl.edu (David Bernhold) writes:
>What we want is "upgradable" hardware - not forced obselesence (sp?).

Come on now, we all knew that the 3/50 was unexpandable when we bought it
- the only thing that could be done to improve it was to install a
MC68881.  It has always been sold as the dirt cheap, bottom of the line,
minimalist workstation for people who needed to buy workstations by the
truckload, on a budget.  It is good for filling a room with happy
undergrads banging on their programming assignments.  If you wanted color
or expansion capacity or other such frills, you bought a 3/110 or a 3/160
or something else, and you paid for it.

>Apple was very good about this with their Macintosh's, why can't
>other people be?

Apple hasn't always been "very good" about this.  From the Mac's
introduction, and persisting for almost a year, their official policy was
that if you even opened up the case you voided the warranty.  Remember the
temerity of the original memory upgrade sellers?  The Mac was intended as
an appliance - and who adds features or capacity to their toaster oven?
It was originally designed not to be internally expandable, because you
could get to everything you really needed via the documented interfaces on
the back of the box.

Market pressures forced Apple to acknowledge that people were going to
expand their Macintoshes, and that the customers considered expansion more
important than even their warranty.

Even if Sun doesn't ever offer a 3/50 memory upgrade (as is likely),
several third-party suppliers are getting into the game.  If the price is
right, we'd like to upgrade all 230 of our 3/50s.  So far, the upgrade is
just a little dear for our budget, even though it's still cheaper than
trading them all in for 3/60s.