[www.cultofmac.com]

September 27, 1979, marked Apple’s earliest cost investigation for the Mac. Raskin’s revolutionary idea was to build a computer, based around a graphical user interface, that would cost $500 or less.

That price (which, with inflation, would equal $1,650 today) seems fairly standard by current terms. However, at the time it would have been significantly cheaper than most regular personal computers. An Apple II, for instance, cost $1,298. And even the TRS-80, a fairly low-cost, bare-bones computer, sold for $599.

Even as a startup, however, Apple already took a high-margin approach to its business. The company expected to put a 400% markup on its machines. That meant Raskin’s computer would need to be manufactured and packaged for $125. The September 27 memo spelled out that this was not possible. It suggested a more reasonable retail price of $1,500.

The memo caused a clash within Apple. Jobs told Raskin that he shouldn’t “worry about the price” and should instead “just specify the computer’s abilities.”

A bristling Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo to Jobs, replicated in the excellent book Apple Confidential 2.0:

“[I want] a small, lightweight computer with an excellent, typewriter style keyboard. It is accompanied by a 96 character by 66 line display that has almost no depth, and a laser-quality printer that also doesn’t weigh much, and takes ordinary paper and produces text at one page per second (not so fast that you can’t catch them as they come out.) The printer can also produce any graphics the screen can show (with at least 1000 by 1200 points of resolution). In color.

The printer should weigh only a fraction of a pound, and never need a ribbon or mechanical adjustment. It should print in any font. There is about 200K bytes of main storage besides screen memory and a miniature, pocketable, storage element that holds a megabyte and costs $.50, in unit quantity.

Jobs’ “feature creep” insistence on building the best possible computer, with no thought for a price point, wound up undercutting a lot of his work at NeXT, the company he founded after leaving Apple. Raskin’s approach, meanwhile, was based on the idea of democratizing technology — which is something Apple has become known for over the years.

Finally, although it took several more years for Jobs to seize control of the Macintosh project, it’s easy to see that as far back as 1979, Raskin and Jobs were never going to happily coexist on Team Mac.

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Ways to improve web conference image and sound quality. [forums.macresource.com]

With those specs & prices, what the hell was Raskin smoking?


"Raskin’s approach, meanwhile, was based on the idea of democratizing technology — which is something Apple has become known for over the years."


$2000+++ computers are NOT "democratizing" technology. 400% mark up is, in my opinion, just the usual corporate greed. I understand that there will be development costs on any project BUT, after said costs have been recouped, 400% mark up is obscene.

Task I was being sarcastic-trying to show how unrealistic Jobs was being.