Re: MacIvory pricing

[Chris Lindblad <cjl@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU>]

    Date: Thu, 1 Sep 88 12:16:38 CDT
    From: forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)

    Micro-Explorer price for academia: $10K, INCLUDING the MAC-II.

A little bit more, like 12K, but a lot less than 28K!

  MX-U2D - Stand-Alone microExplorer System:
  Mac II personal computer w/2 80MB disk drives and cables, 640 x 480 mono
  monitor, MicroExplorer Development Software on 800 KB disketts, factory
  installed.

  List Price		University Price	Maint An/Mo

  $22,789		$11,995			$1158/104

As far as I can tell, Symbolics set their list price for their delivery
workstation to be just under the price for the TI development station.

Considering that you get twice as much memory and twice as much disk in the
Symbolics system, there could be an argument for a higher price for a MacIvory
devlopment system.  If you bought another 4MB of memory from TI and another
160 MB of disk, you would add another $8933 to the list price, or $4925 to the
Educational price, making (at list price) a TI development system more
expensive than the similarly-configured Symbolics development system.

Still, the $7000 price difference between the minimum TI and the minimum
Symbolics development systems could be large enough for many to chose the TI
product over the Symbolics product, on difference in list price only.

    I haven't heard MacIvory academic prices yet.

TI seems to be being real aggressive in this area, It would be interesting to
see what Symbolics will do.  Still it seems that they will be hard pressed to
be able to sell their machine for $ 12,000, being that just a MAC II with 8MB
of NUBUS memory and a 300MB hard disk would take up quite a sizeable chunk of
that price.