From: joy@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Chien-Chung Chen)
Subject: Re: Where the mac really wins
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 10:02:34 GMT

In article <1h33k2INNh0m@uniwa.uwa.edu.au> craig@ec.uwa.oz.au (Craig Richmond - division) writes:
>joy@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Chien-Chung Chen) writes:
>>I really don't understand why you should be sad. Why do you want Mac's
>>resale price to be high? Because you want to sell your old Mac to get a
>>new Mac, right? But you complain about Apple's cutting the price?
>>Oh, I see. You don't want to buy a new Mac. You want to sell your old
>>Mac and get a PC. :)
>
>Because unfortunately I work at a university and because we are not the
>capitalistic swine that some other universities are, we do not demand that
>every student coming to the university buy a computer (which will be worth
>40% of the purchase value after 1 year) and we provide labs of computers
>for the students to come and use.

I haven't seen any universilty demanding students to buy a computer.
There probably exist such "capitalistic swines" somewhere in the world
that I have yet to see.

>Many of the students who come and use our lab only use the computers for
>2-3 hours a week and would never even contemplate a computer for the home.
>The average computer will set you back $2000 after CPU, printer etc and
>will be worth $0 in 5 years.  at 150 hours per year that comes to about 750
>hours of use for some of our less enthusiastic students which means that
>their wonderful 486 bought now has cost them $2 an hour to use when they
>can come into the University lab and spend nothing in our lab, or $1 a day
>in the Maths lab.
>
>Now because of this, it is the responsibility of the University to provide
>computers on desks for students who NEED to use them to do coursework.
>Unfortunately every year we buy computers and at the end of the year when
>we come to sell them, they aren't worth anything.

But you can buy cheap for the new ones, right?

The drop of old computer's resale price comes largely from the drastic
cutting of new computer's price. If your university is to buy new
computers to replace the old ones, then I think the dropping of computer
prices is good to your university's finance. 

>So within 5 years, we
>may well require every student to buy a computer.  Now how would you feel
>if your university demanded you buy a computer of certain specifications
>before you enrolled?  It would certainly add about A$3000 to the cost of
>attending our University.

Don't! Don't be such a "capitalistic swine". :)

>Me personally?  I own a macintosh SE/30 and I will be selling it before the
>end of next year and the impending release of the PowerPC.  I don't even
>know if I will bother buying a new computer because I don't use it anyway.
>I use the ones at work.  (Which are devaluing horribly and hard to replace
>without adding large sums of money)

If you want to sell your old Mac and don't intend to buy a new one,
the drop of the resale price Mac indeed is sad to you. Otherwise,
you should be happy to know that you can buy a new one with a low
price.

>Have I made my point?

Well, I don't know.

-- Chien-Chung Chen
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware