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Want a Sparc Workstation for $995?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fetch-sparcy-fetch dept.

frankie writes "Several news agencies are reporting that Sun is breaking the $1000 mark with its Blade 100 workstation. It's got USB, FireWire, and PCI -- aimed at competing with the x86 desktop market. One thing it doesn't have, though, is any mention at all on Sun's own web site..."

7 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what kind of ram is it? by Carmen+Electron · · Score: 4

    EEC ram is designed for the European Economic Commmunity. It complies with the stronger safety, quality, and legal requirements required in the new European Union. It will generally cost 3X as much as US ram, largely because of extra taxes.

    If it breaks down, however, the universal tech support available in most liberal European countries will repair it free of charge.

    --
    (Score:-1, Underranted)
  2. Sun's website by Eoli · · Score: 4

    What about this? OK, it's the Sun store, but it's there.

  3. I got one for $20 by Rader · · Score: 4
    I bought my Sun SparcStation 2 (with 20" monitor) a few months ago for only $20 at the university scrap auction. :)

    My girlfriend wouldn't let me buy the 1/2 ton VAX for $105 though :(

    Rader

  4. Is too on Sun's site by Col.+Klink+(retired) · · Score: 4
    You must not have looked too hard:

    http://www.sun.com/desktop/sunblade100/

    --

    -- Don't Tase me, bro!

  5. Re:Instead of PCI by Geekboy(Wizard) · · Score: 4

    The SunPCi card uses a 600Mhz Celeron for the processor. Details at http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/

  6. Instead of PCI by mclearn · · Score: 4

    ...the Slashdot article should read SunPCi . This is a card witha chip on it that allows the user to run existing x86 applications under the Solaris OS. The article confused me with the line:

    "With a PCi card for an extra $195, the Sun Blade 100 machine would be able to run applications on both Microsoft's Windows and Sun's Solaris operating system."

    Until I looked it up on Sun's site at: http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/sunpcij tf.html

  7. That's not unusual at all by sjbe · · Score: 5
    It is very common for the big unix vendors to have obscene markup on anything related to their proprietary systems. Sun, SGI, IBM, HP,... they all do it. If you want official hardware supported by them you're going to pay at least 2-3 times the going rate for the same commodity hardware. CDROM's will cost $500 or more instead of the usual $150 or so we expect. RAM prices from the vendor are out of this world usually.

    And if you sign up for "maintenance" (read tech support that is even vaguely useful) you're going to drop a lot of money each year for that too. In some cases, more than you'll end up paying more than the cost of the machine. Until we got rid of it recently, at work we were paying $18,000 a year in maintenance for an Onyx/2 that was 3 years old. For reference, you can buy a $4000 PC now that is faster than the machine we had. Granted it was a great machine but we certainly were not getting our money's worth.

    And people wonder why linux is gaining such a following...