In a bid to maintain its position, along with IBM and Compaq, as one of the three companies which dominate the personal computer market, Apple Computer Inc yesterday announced the Macintosh SE/30, and the UK company followed its parent in lowering prices for its Macintosh SE range. Described by Apple as the fifth generation Mac Plus, the SE/30 is designed to give high end performance throughout the SE family, and is aimed at the broad business and educational markets. As expected (CI No 1,088), the SE/30 uses a 16MHz Motorola 68030 processor and features the Apple Superdrive floppy, an internal 1.44Mb drive that can read and write Apple II ProDos, Macintosh, MS-DOS, and OS/2 files. The SE also features the 68882 floating point co-processor, so that it does sums up to 100 times faster than the SE, which Apple hopes will appeal to computer-aided design users in areas like architecture. Overall, the SE/30 is said to be up to four times faster than the SE. It takes up to 8Mb on the motherboard, has the SE’s 9 black and white display, and the 030 Direct slot to allow access to expansion cards – the SE/30 offers the same external interfaces as its predecessors and can support the full range of Apple and third party peripherals, networking and communications products. The 2Mb SE/30 is UKP3,420, a 4Mb version is UKP4,000 and both arrive in March. In the US, a 1Mb SE/30 is $4,370, add a 40Mb disk and it’s $4,870, 80Mb disk and 4Mb memory, $6,570. An upgrade kit will be offered to SE users. The new UK prices for the MacPlus, SE 1/2fl, SE 2/20 and SE 2/40 are UKP1,355, UKP2,165, UKP2,665, and UKP2,965 respectively.
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