M a c C P U: 1400 G3 upgrades

1400 upgrades - what happened?
The story behind the 1400 upgrade shortage is one of those tales that we vendors learn but customers rarely realize what goes on behind closed doors.

Previous PowerBook G3 1400 upgrades
About two years ago Newer Technology announced G3 upgrades for the PowerBook 1400 series. We took a ton of orders and as with most Newer announcements, the product was a teensy bit more vapor than ware. Apple released the new G3 series PowerBook and it looked to us like it was no real leap forward over the 1400. As a matter of fact, I picked up one of those G3s in a local store and thought it was more of a luggable than a portable.

I saw someone selling sealed new 1400 units at a give-away prices so we bought one with the idea of giving it away with an upgrade in it. But Newer delayed. And delayed. We couldn't resist opening it up, just for a look-see, and before you could say "Boo!" to a goose, it became our Official Office Portable (which means that Barbara uses it to surf in bed).

The PowerBook 1400 is my favorite Mac
Apple has made over 600 various models of computers. I don't get overexcited any more when Steve Jobs gets up on the podium to announce another new variation. Actually it's rare to find a quantum leap when you have released over 600 computers, they all do about the same thing.

But every once in awhile Apple hits a home run. No one can doubt the success of the iMac or iBook and it's damned rare to have two hits at the same time. Every Mac aficionado will have his or her own personal favorite. I love the Quadra 650. We still have one churning away as a print server and it had over 10,000 hours of use as my primary machine. It was a better machine than most of those which came either before or after it.

But my all time favorite Mac is a PowerBook 1400 maxed out with 64MB of RAM, sporting a G3 upgrade, anyG3 upgrade. No one has made an upgrade for the machine in the last year and that's about the craziest thing I ever heard.

The rise and fall of The Vimage Corporation
In the summer of 1998, a Japanese company called Interware decided to open a US branch. They did and called it Vimage. They had the first L2 upgrades of any kind and had G3 upgrades for both the 1400 and 2400. It's hard to imagine how a company could fail with top quality products (believe me, they were) who kept them on the shelf for immediate delivery (contrary to the anything we'd ever experienced before). And we had a wonderful sales rep, who actually knew what was going on.

But the guy running the operation also maintained their website. And it was so bad, you just wanted to cry. They had great products, great pricing but you damned near couldn't buy one because their site was so poorly designed. We thought we could work well with them because of our experience with CPU upgrades. But the head dog was one of those people who know everything long before he knows anything. They seemed to prefer doing retail sales rather than wholesale. They wouldn't do anything for us and we didn't feel like building a market for them when in reality they were our biggest competitor on the web. Vimage are now gone.

The iBook looms
For six months between the summer of 1998 and early 1999, Newer couldn't deliver and Vimage couldn't figure out how to sell. Rumors of the upcoming iBook started floating around. Both Vimage and Newer believed the machine would come in at about $999 and ship in maybe May of 1999. So CPU upgrade prices could not seem too costly.

Drowning in upgrades
Then Newer did something very out of character. They produced a lot of product. Like a 2-year supply! Out of the blue they suddenly started to take delivery of boatloads (and I mean boatloads) of 1400 upgrades made for them by IBM in Japan. And because they aren't used to having product stacked up in inventory they needed to get rid of it. So they lowered prices. And lowered them again and the upgrades were dumped at well below cost just to get them out the door. We were baffled. We had dealers crawling out of the woodwork who had never sold an upgrade before calling us up to offer us anything from 70-1,000 units at prices so low they were plumb crazy.

The Big Crash
The upgrades went from $499 to $279 in about two weeks. In fact, we'd bought an upgrade for our own 1400, and the very next week it was $100 less, retail, than we'd just paid wholesale. We pushed Vimage to lower price because we sure weren't going to sell any of their upgrades at $499 when someone could buy the Newer equivalent for $279. And customers looked at the prices and figured out that if the price dropped $220 in two weeks, they should hang on and wait. So a lot of people didn't buy, hoping they'd drop to $59 in the next two weeks. And they waited, and lost out.

Newer lost a bundle on the deal and Vimage lost money on the deal because they couldn't give their upgrades away, either. And all those customers who thought they were going to snap one up even more dirt-cheap, well, it didn't happen. Both Newer and Vimage stopped making the upgrades. Then Apple didn't deliver the iBook until November and it cost $1599. And in the end rumor has it that the good proportion of those upgrades were sold to Japan, from whence they came. And that was the last we saw of them except the odd sale on eBay where you could get 600 bucks for one with 58 people bidding.

So for most of the last year you couldn't even steal a PB 1400 upgrade. We have had hundreds of calls and eMails from customers begging for them. Someone offered Barb $600 for ours but I wouldn't let her sell it. We pleaded with both Newer and Interware to make upgrades for us and we would pay up front. But the answer was "no." Daft.

Sonnet's new 1400 upgrade
Now Sonnet has come into the 21st Century with an upgrade for the 1400. It's fast: 333MHz with 512k of backside cache, which is just fine and dandy. It runs cool because it's made from a copper chip. It doesn't cost $159. Both Vimage and Newer shot themselves in the foot a year ago with their insane pricing, believe me, you can price a product too low.

The Sonnet 1400 upgrade comes in at an affordable $389 and Sonnet does know how to both deliver on time and keep product on the shelf. If you want an upgrade now or three months from now, it will be available and it will work; it'll be dead easy to install and fast.

So for the first time in two years, we are taking pre-orders for a product. I have an agreement with Sonnet that if they will just deliver on time we won't let the air out of their tires. Or worse. We will begin deliveries in February and just as soon as we can get a firm date, we will let you know.

The PowerBook 1400 and a G3 is a marriage made in heaven. It is a far better machine than any of the alternatives at a similar price range. If you have a 1400, you deserve a G3 upgrade for it. If you do not have a 1400, you deserve one.

And, yes, the heatsink's gonna be purple.

You can preorder here
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January 7, 2000

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