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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..."

1 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. 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...