CompuServe Messages

Ethan, Look… First of all, the a1000's development costs have long since been assimilated. The molding, the design, etc. The chips are better now, and certainly cheaper. You keep going on about the 500 being kept low priced for the "lowend" user. If it had an RF mod built into it, it would be cheaper for THEM to just buy the machine and use it with their TV. For the more advanced user, they could buy a monitor and they would be out probably another 5-10$ at the most, but they have this new capability which, btw, makes the base 500 MUCH more portable. If the a1000 was re-engineered to have a couple of slots, the fat agnus, and KS ROMs, it would be cheaper than it was, all other things being equal – one very expensive item that would be gone is the kickstart ram daughter board. The question isn't at _all_ how expensive the a1000 would be, it's entirely "what would it do to the sales of the 2000 series." I am quite certain, from reading your messages in this thread, that you have never been on a design team for a computer system, and that you have little idea of the realities behind it's initial development costs, its manufacturing costs, how these are applied to the selling price from the manufacturer, and what that means _to_ the manufacturer. Not your fault, of course, but please lighten up on the declarations of how much the 500 "can" sell for and so on. Bottom line is C= doesn't WANT to do these things, or they would already be done. Why? I don't know – and you don't either. We can guess based upon their recent history, and the verdict is virtually certain to be incompetance if we use that yardstick. But we ARE guessing. Ben Amateur Radio Callsign is A A 7 A S