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Article from Sound On Sound, July 1993 |
Apple slash yet more Mac prices this month. Kendall Wrightson reports.
Hardly a month passes without a press release from Apple announcing yet another new or repackaged Mac. Last month lucky LCI/II owners saw the value of their silicon drop by a third. This month PowerBook owners get the chance to experience that sinking feeling as Apple release the PowerBook 145B and the 180c. The latter is a colour version of the 180, though unlike the 165c, the 180c offers an active rather than passive matrix display. However, the 180's display is even smaller than the now humbled 165c. The latter has been reduced by a massive £600.
The 'new' 145B is a PowerBook 145 by any other name (well, the same name actually) minus a microphone (what a catastrophe) but including a backup/restore utility (wow!). More significantly, the 'B' has 4MB of RAM soldered directly on to its motherboard, which means you don't have to throw away 2MB of RAM to upgrade to 6 or 8MB. Even more significantly, the 145B will debut at £999 (4/40) — £396 less than the 145. A (4/80) 145B costs around £1149.
The 145 will now follow the PowerBook 100, 140 and 170 into obscurity, as will the 160, a full two months short of its first birthday. Apple are keeping tight-lipped about this decision, but the gap left by the 160 cannot remain vacant for long.
Mac prices have been in free-fall for several months now, a trend that is likely to continue as Apple accelerate their plan to broaden the Mac installed user base at all levels — or, as some might say, dump excess production. (Centris 610 4/80s, including 14" ACD and ethernet cards, are being sold for as little as £1149). The latest example of Apple's pricing strategy is the scrapping of the Suggested Selling Price (SRP), a move that allows dealers to advertise 'street' prices. The result is a price war that has already cut street prices by around 5%.
There are several other factors that have led to significant price decreases over the past two months. The first is the arrival of yet more Performas: the 405 (an LCII 4/80 with 4-bit colour), the 430 (an LCIII 4/120 with 8-bit colour) and the 450 (a re-badged LCIII 4/120 with 8-bit colour). Like all Performas, the latest trio include a 14" Apple Colour Display and are shipped with PC Exchange and ClarisWorks (version 2.0 is excellent, by the way).
Factor two is the option to purchase a Mac with a new £199 Apple 14" VGA display rather than the standard £299 Apple Colour Display. The former isn't truly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and contains a Samsung tube rather than the ACD's Sony Trinitron. However, the VGA display lops one hundred quid off the system price of an LC, Mac II or Centris (if you can cope with the slight reduction in viewing quality). By the time you read this, Apple should have released another 14" colour monitor, the £795 'multimedia' display that offers built-in loudspeakers.
Further evidence of the Mac's ever widening appeal is the appearance of built-in Mac MIDI ports on tone modules such as Yamaha's TG series. The first MIDI keyboard synthesizer to get the Mac connection treatment is Kawai's new 32-voice multitimbral K11. However, though built-in Mac ports are good news, they do give Apple even less reason to fit MIDI ports to Macs and Performas.
While Coda's Finale is the 'de facto' standard for Music Transcription DTP on the Mac, its user interface is over-complicated, with users complaining about getting lost in "dialogue box hell". Coda promise that version 3.0 will offer a redesigned interface (featuring on-screen rulers and reorganised menus) plus extended on-line help, including a message bar that provides information on the use of each tool.
As Finale didn't evolve from a MIDI sequencer, its MIDI recording and playback facilities leave a lot to be desired. Coda have decided to attend to this lacuna too, adding transport controls and a sequencer-like instrument list.
Other features include an apply articulations command and multiple open documents. 'Smart articulations' snap to the correct position with relation to the note head, moving automatically should the note's stem direction change. Version 3.0 will be offered free to 2.6.3 owners who purchased Finale after January 1st 1993. All other categories of Finale and Music Prose owners can upgrade to Finale (contact MCMXCIX: (Contact Details)).
News of Performer 4.2 (essentially two pages of bug fixes) and Notator Logic 1.6 next month.
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Feature by Kendall Wrightson
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