Sculley makes surprise announcement at Tokyo conference

In a move atypical of today’s Apple Computer, which usually refuses to discuss products in development, chairman John Sculley quietly announced at last month’s International Multimedia Conference in Tokyo that the company will ship a computer with a built-in CD-ROM drive before the end of 1992.

Though the news didn’t find its way into headlines in the U.S., the early announcement was a pleasant surprise for many Macintosh developers who’ve been wondering why Apple waited so long.

Reports differ about exactly which computer will sport a new CD-ROM drive, or what type of drive –a standard CD-ROM, enhanced CD-ROM XA, or some other type — will be built into the new CPU.

David Nagel, the vice president of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, would confirm only that the announcement was about “a low-cost CPU with a built-in CD-ROM drive.” But others attending the Tokyo conference heard Sculley say the Macintosh LC would be chosen to be shipped with a built-in CD-ROM drive.

The LC is the least expensive color Macintosh; equipped with Apple’s 12-inch color monitor, it can display 256 colors in 5125384 pixels. A 13-inch high-resolution monitor, which requires a video ram upgrade, can display 6405480 pixels of resolution.

Chandran Cheriyan, CD-ROM product manager at Apple, says that the announcement “wasn’t a total surprise,” but that there’s no further information on specifications at this point. With no fanfare, the company recently started shipping an upgraded version of its CD-ROM drive, an Apple-labeled Sony CD-ROM XA-compatible drive called the AppleCD SC Plus, for $799. (Apple says the Plus is not a true XA drive because it doesn’t contain the ADPCM chip that decompresses the compressed audio of the XA format.)

Cheriyan says he doesn’t know if the SC Plus is the drive that will be included in the final product specifications. But whatever the specifications, “it will be a product, we promise you that,” says Apple spokeswoman Patty Tulloch.

MEETING WITH QUALIFIED ENTHUSIASM

Developers in the U.S., most of whom had only heard whispers of the Tokyo announcement, greeted the news with cautious enthusiasm.

“I’d only heard rumors about it, but that’s terrific,” says Linda Rich, director of new business development for Warner New Media, the Time-Warner subsidiary based in Burbank, CA. “It would be interesting to know the price point and the other specs of the machine … unfortunately, my immediate reaction is, if it’s an LC, we’re not developing for the LC with a 12-inch monitor. It doesn’t have sufficient screen resolution.”

Rich says WNM is waiting to see if there’s sufficient market penetration of the LC before it starts developing titles for it. “It’s twice as expensive, because we have to do a completely new set of art work and for Warner New Media, that’s a real issue. The Multimedia PC (MPC) is at least 6405480 [pixels of resolution on-screen].”

Doug Carlston, president of Broderbund Software in San Rafael, CA, isn’t concerned about screen resolution, since Broderbund’s titles are already designed to work on an LC. “I’m delighted,” he says about the Tokyo announcement, at which Sculley demonstrated one of Broderbund’s new Living Books titles. “We’ve been yelling and screaming about it, as you can guess, for a long time. It will certainly make our lives easier.”

But Carlston is equally puzzled by the long lead time. “It doesn’t strike me as all that complicated a thing to do, but maybe there’s a lot more to it than I realize.”

“We think it’s a good start,” says Tom Rielly, director of marketing for the Voyager Co. in Santa Monica, CA. “Apple is finally overcoming its religious dogma about no read-only media in the CPU. We encourage it to be an option across the Macintosh product line, and we think it’s absolutely essential if Apple is to continue to be a viable platform for content delivery.”

Rielly also says that the move is a step in the right direction for Apple because despite Apple’s superior hardware and software integration, which makes its machines the development platform of choice, the company is still trailing the MPC because its machines don’t come with a CD-ROM drive. But, he says, even a relatively low-cost color computer such as the LC, equipped with a CD-ROM drive, is too expensive — its street price, with monitor, is about $2,600. “The magic price point is $1,000,” Rielly says.

WHY SO LONG?

The pre-announcement was the most public sign of internal discussions under way deep inside Apple about its strategy for multimedia and digital media-based products and applications. By all accounts, the huge splash made by the MPC titles launch in early October has stirred the company into rapid motion.

“We’re looking at how to get competitive in multimedia again,” says Tulloch. “A lot of people are thinking about what’s going to be our long-term multimedia strategy, what’s the long-term strategy for consumer products, and how Kaleida [the multimedia joint venture between Apple and IBM] fits into that.”

In addition, one may assume that Apple is thinking about how another of its partners, Sony Corp., might also fit into its long-term strategy for digital media-capable hardware — especially because of the warm reception it’s receiving for its new PowerBook line of notebook computers, and also because Sculley also mentioned to a New York Times reporter at the Tokyo conference that Apple was in discussions with Sony about a possible joint venture.

Enter Sony. Apple is known to be working with Sony on multimedia products as well. These are likely to include the CD-I-like consumer player, code-named Fast Eddy, as well as a smaller, handheld player code-named Sweet Pea.

Whatever is happening in the subterranean realm of Apple’s product development labs or in the rarefied air of its executive suites, it’s hard to figure why it would take Apple engineers, whose multimedia tools and technology have already spurred the development of some 200 CD-ROM-based titles, an entire year to slip a CD-ROM drive inside a Macintosh case. As one developer said, “By the end of 1992? That’s too long. Just redo the bezel [the casing that holds the computer's electronics] and ship it!”

Unfortunately, according to Apple’s Nagel, the seemingly simple task of remolding the Macintosh’s plastic is what he calls a “pacing item” to getting a new computer out the door, especially since a CD-ROM drive requires retooling the Macintosh to accommodate media significantly larger than the Mac’s standard 3.5-inch floppy. Apple even uses its in-house Cray supercomputer to simulate mold-flow analysis for bezel design, but the process — which requires extremely precise measurements — is indeed time-intensive.

Nonetheless, to take a whole year, especially with the MPC boulder crashing down the mountain at breakneck speed, seems more nonchalant than the present situation warrants.

Denise Caruso