anonconformist

I didn’t  other worrying about applying for a lease for a DTK M1 machine because while I’m a developer by trade for another company (currently developer support, most accurately) and do iOS/Mac development, I’ve not committed to doing it seriously enough where there’d be business sense to lease it.

That’s what I don’t get: my limited understanding is this was explicitly a “lease” for $500, and while you can justify it benefits Apple to have verified M1 native applications out of the gate, presuming the developer is serious and otherwise viable in a business sense (you need to be able to live and pay bills from sales), risk management says you pay the $500 lease to ensure you are a competitor out of the gate with M1 support for performance and compatibility without worrying about if Rosetta will do an acceptable translation (it isn’t successful in 100% of apps, it’d suck to find out yours was in that tiny fraction of a percent where it fails).

Never enter into a contract you don’t understand and/or can’t afford to honor.  If the terms said Apple could demand the machines back at any given time or whatever, that’s a calculated risk.  If they’ve fulfilled the terms of the contract, and there are no terms where Apple pays you back for returning the machines, well, getting back any money at all for returning it is purely good will on the part of Apple, but they’re not remotely obligated to do so unless they spelled it out in the contract, or perhaps they actually are changing the terms after the fact, in which case it may simply be cheaper to do so than to fight any cases in a legal court or the court of public opinion.

Any lease I do (I’ve only done short-term leases of small tools or rental cars, other than apartments) I have a  complete expectation of returning whatever I leased, no money coming back to me, unless spelled out in the contract otherwise.  That’s what mature people do.

I see the $500 lease in this case as a way to at least weed out a percentage of non-serious riffraff from just getting a prototype for whatever reason at no cost to them, but at cost to Apple. Those costs to Apple aren’t just the price of a machine.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if those DTK machines weren’t certified via various country’s governmental agencies for use in various areas, like residential zoning, where regulations vary. Each outstanding prototype machine is a liability as well as an asset for Apple.

Very entertaining, watching “adults” getting upset over not getting at least a full lease refund for prototypes that if used properly, give them a business advantage.  What a bunch of crybabies!

Xed said:

CiaranF said:

Is there any games with it? 🤣

Anything you can program with Apple BASIC… assuming it also comes with the original tape and you can get the Apple I to work with a cassette drive.

The Apple I came with Integer BASIC: Applesoft BASIC didn’t exist early on. If you were concerned with floating point, you had to use a lot of code space to make that happen.

The other language you could write games in is 6502 assembly/machine language.  This is what the majority of games for the Apple 2 series were written in, definitely anywhere performance was important, because no interpreted language was snappy.

Ah, how I wish I had the time and money to spend on such a fine piece of tech history.

In today’s world it has no real practical value, and would qualify as a white elephant collectible. It’d make a useful piece of hardware to learn 6502 programming on, and practice low-level coding, because it’s not likely to have much available that’ll run on it anyway.

At some point, what can you practically use the largest market cap in the world for that doesn't put you in the crosshairs of governments for breakup, if only to keep you from becoming too powerful to keep under reasonable control for said governments? Big money can have outsized effects when aimed at goals chosen by those not chosen by the people of the relevant jurisdiction.

If:

1. Developers are still alive and developing
2. The payback is high enough to be worth it to them