"Misery, heartbreak, sorrow, and despair. No, I'm not talking about adolescence; I'm referring to what happens when you're stuck with a PC from Hell. Systems that were overpriced and underpowered, parts that failed two days after the warranty expired, marathon phone calls with brain-dead tech support staff - over the years we've suffered more than our share of ills, and so have millions of other innocent PC users. But picking these 10 Worst PCs of All Time wasn't as easy as it sounds."
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Member since:2005-07-24
Member since:2005-11-10
Of course, I was just presenting it from their angle, given the work they had recently achieved.
The original Mac could have been cheaper, but there was perceived value in the technological advantages of the Mac. Apple didn't understand that the user wasn't technical enough to be aware of these differences, and was driven greatly by price.
Member since:2005-11-16
It's perennial enough to be cliche. But it is usually better to be good enough at the right price than to be the best at the wrong one.
Except the IBM PC was significantly more expensive than many superior competitors. If you want to know why the PC was such a success, the price definitely isn't the answer.
Member since:2005-11-16
They were mortified at what they found. Shoddy, underpowered parts thrown together in a shoddy case, with even soddier software.
The poor design decisions IBM made, as they rushed their PC to market, should be enough on their own to earn it a place on the list. Those initial mistakes haunted the PC for years to come, and forced a series of hacks and kludges that arguably still affect the PC today.
Having said that, if IBM had taken the PC more seriously and spent more effort designing it, we might not have PC clones on 95% of desktops today.
A system with lots of elegantly designed custom hardware, and a superior OS designed by IBM, would almost certainly have been a much better computer than the IBM PC running MS-DOS. However, it wouldn't have been so easy for companies like Compaq to create compatible systems. It would still have been a success in the business world thanks to the IBM brand name, but would they have entered the home without cheap clones?
Member since:
2005-11-10
Aye, I remember the story about the [original] Mac engineers buying an IBM PC when they came out and taking it back to Apple to have a look at it. They were mortified at what they found. Shoddy, underpowered parts thrown together in a shoddy case, with even soddier software.
They had just finished pouring their heart and soul into building a machine with a custom board designed to use as few chips as possible (unlike the IBM PC which had many needless parts due to bad design) and with a mouse, a gui, a 3.5" floppy drive and a 32-bit processor, and here was their successor, a bunch of underpowered bits thrown together in a box.