Pioneer Electronics Corp’s new Macintosh clone got its first non-Japanese outing at the CeBIT show last week. Though nominally a prototye, the box, driven by a 66MHz PowerPC 601, is essentially finished and was shown running KanjiScript, together with a few applications. At this stage however, Pioneer’s marketing plan can only be described as tentative. Closely wedded to the consumer audio and video market, the company intends to stay on its home turf – consequently it has designed a Mac-alike whose system box is dominated by three loudspeakers built into the front. The machine will be aimed at the fireside market and the company has absolutely no plans to go for the business at the moment. Over the next few months, Pioneer will begin test-marketing the machine in around 100 to 250 stores in the Tokyo and Osaka areas. There will, said the Pioneer representative (whose business card your correspondent managed to lose) be about four or five key distributors – companies with which Pioneer has previously had a close working relationship in the consumer electronics market, and which are now also handling computers. How long will the test marketing go on for? It depends – we’ll initially try for three months, if everyone hates it, we’ll stop – if they like it, well… he says, candidly. A price has yet to be announced – the company is leaving it to the last minute to try and avoid being hit by fluctuations in the dollar.
