Agreed, Rex, about how nicely the SI was put together, but it was really a matter of form following function. The SI broke some price barrier ... don't recall the number ... but I bought a couple of them. The elegance you saw was the result of a design that allowed an extremely low assembly cost. Only problem with the SI was that they didn't stop the economizing there. It extended to the data transfer path, which throttled the 68030 process to half it's potential ... and they left out the FPU. Adding the FPU as an accessory was a real performance booster.
Bill On Saturday, April 30, 2005, at 10:58 PM, Rex Baldazo wrote: > I bought a dead Mac Iisi at the flea market today because I wanted the > case for a media PC project I'm gonna build. After gutting it this > evening I just have to say that is perhaps the most elegant job of > hardware engineering I've ever seen. Almost everything was > custom-designed to snap together--there were no screws holding the > motherboard or the drives, they just snapped into place. > > And the fan was amazing, another marvel of snap-in design. Must have > made for great airflow on the motherboard since there were no cables or > wires in the way. Even the fan snapped directly onto the motherboard > instead of using a cable. > > I don't think anybody, not even Apple, makes computers this elegant > anymore. Not when you want to be able to switch suppliers on a dime if > you get a cheaper bid, you can't go with stuff like the custom fan that > was in this Iisi. > > It's a nice reminder though of what can be done if a company wants to > spend the time and money. > > --- Rex. > > > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be April 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> > | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup> > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be April 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
