ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 11, 1996 TAG: 9601110086
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
SOURCE: San Francisco Examiner
USED HARDWARE AND NEW SOFTWARE are among the offerings at the Macworld Expo. How about a carrying case for that PowerBook?
If you're going to the Macworld Expo, bring a charge card. Or two.
``This is buyer's show,'' said Mike McNeill, president of Club Mac, which parked a semitrailer full of hardware on the floor of Moscone Center North. ``At least we hope so.''
With 1,500 exhibits covering 400,000 square feet, Macworld offers everything from deluxe travel cases for PowerBooks to cheap software and computer trinkets.
The main clot of hardware vendors in Moscone North included Club Mac and Computown. Nearby, Pre-Owned Electronics offered refurbished, used Macs with six-month warranties.
Show veterans said that by Wednesday, hardware vendors would have scoped out each other's prices and adjusted accordingly. So if you see it, and the price is right, buy it rather than waiting for the price to fall. Or be prepared to go home without it.
Judging from the crowds, one of the hottest products at the show was PhotoDeluxe from Adobe Systems Inc. This $90, simplified version of the professional PhotoShop program lets people manipulate and edit photos that have been scanned into a digital form. Adobe, which said it would ship PhotoDeluxe by the end of January, was taking show orders for $70. The program requires a Mac with a CD-ROM drive and 8 to 12 megabytes of memory to run.
ACT makes it simple for Newton to share and update address book and calendar info with Mac and Window PCs, turning the one-pound Newton into a mirror-image of the office computer.
Power Computing was packed with show-goers curious to see the new, low-cost, high-performance Mac clones. Nearby, DayStar Digital was selling its pricier, super-performance Mac clones for high-end publishing and editing.
But another clone wannabe bowed out of the game Tuesday. Radius Inc., beset with financial woes, said it was spinning off its line of SuperMac clones into a new, as yet unnamed company that would be 80 percent owned by Umax Technologies Inc. and 20 percent owned by Radius.
Umax is the Taiwanese firm that signed a separate clone deal with Apple in November. What it might want with a second line of clones wasn't clear, as officials at Umax's Fremont office said the deal was being handled by Taiwan.
In the technology game, for every dream that dies several new ones are born. And at the Be Inc., former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee was having entirely too much fun chasing his new dream, the BeBox, a computer so new and so raw that he has aimed it at what he calls the ``lunatic fringe.''
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. High-tech buffs flock to the Macworld Expo in Sanby CNBFrancisco, where new items are selling like hot cakes. color.