"John Smith" wrote in message
...
I don't think the "apple boys" had ever designed a complete computer before
they did--indeed, don't remember anyone else (or team of engineers, techs,
scientists, etc...) doing a desktop before then...

You mean, China, Russia, India, USA, Canada, So. American, Mexico,
etc--and
every gov't, business, private individual, ham and cb'er... is not a big
enough market... these things would be manufactured in China yanno!!!


Nope the entire world wide population of hams is NOT enough. The US has
just under 700,000. Japan has somewhere around 1 million (there numbers are
hard to determine due to their licensing system). The remainder of the
world combined has right around the same total of the US. This gives a
worldwide ham population of under 2.5 million. So starting from that
rough estimate, let's look at some figures. Very, very few people buy a new
HF rig annually. Just using the people I know, it's more like every 5 to 10
years. So let's use an average of 7.5 years. That means a total of 333,000
new radios (rounding off the answer) sold in any given year. Now split that
between 3 makers, yielding 111,000 units per maker. That's pretty low
volume to undertake radical development. We're probably lucky that we get
any new features.

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE