FLAME Concerning Apple's pricing of A/UX 2.0.

[Bolo]

In article <190 at news.nd.edu> mahesh at news.nd.edu (Mahesh Subramanya) writes:
>From article <1990Jun1.185845.24189 at ox.com>, by time at ox.com (Tim Endres):
>> 
>> Developers! BEWARE OF A/UX 2.0!
>> Apple can not support it, they can not price it, they will not
		 ^^^^^^^
	Funny, we've never had any trouble getting through to tech support,
the few times we've had to call. They've been very helpful.

>> sell it! And your product will sink along with its sales!
>I have got to agree with the above.  It is almost scary to see what Apple
>gets away with when it comes to foisting things off on its *devoted* fans.

Remember, A/UX is an ADD ON operating system for the Macintosh. You already
get the Macintosh OS free. So, let's compare prices against Unix for, say,
your typical 386.

What's the price on a 386 Unix with: windowing system, TCP/IP support, SLIP
support, NFS, Adobe Transcript, C and Fortran compilers, UUCP, full Berkeley
networking, job control, streams and sockets, fast file system, nroff,
troff, Berkeley line printer system, multiple ethernet support (we've got
4 in our router), and all standard utilties. Retail, since that's what I've
heard quoted for A/UX.

The prices I've seen seem pretty much in line with other systems,
especially if you consider other factors than straight single-quantity price.
For example, Sun may include the OS in the price of the box, but they
also charged us around $800 for the last SUNOS upgrade to our Sun 3. Not
to mention charging an additional $750 for an ethernet driver that works
with more than 2 ethernet cards. (university price, with no support).
Oh, and if you haven't checked, the price for A/UX goes down drastically
with quantity (or, it did for 1.1.1. I don't have a price list for 2.0
yet). Dropped from around $600 at quantity 1 to something under $50 at
some large number.

I also seem to remember a VAR program for A/UX that was announced about
the time it was first released. If it still exists (ever existed?) then
it should have some quantity discounts involved also (assuming you plan
on selling more than a few systems).

	Robert
-- 
Robert K. Shull
rob at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu				chinet!uokmax!rob