Apricots look good, but may leave a sour taste

Press, 11 February 1986, Page 28

Apricots look good, but may leave a sour taste

By

GARETH POWELL

I have always admired the looks of the Apricot line of computers. They have often been called the Bang and Olafson of computers and the description is not wrong.

Now comes news from Britain that Apricot has got itself into strife and is having to trade itself back into a profitable position. The first steps it has taken are to cut the number of models if offers from 14 to seven, close its West German subsidiary and announce 120 redundancies. No-one knows what the final financial figure for the year will be, but with a pre-tax loss of £4.6 million (SNZII.9 million) in the first six months it is unlikely to make happy reading. Where did Apricot go wrong? Theories abound, but the general consensus is as follows.

First, it was hit by a general downturn in computer sales and a ferocious price war in Britain. Second, it has been sug-

gested that it got too big for its boots when it decided to move into the horrendously competitive American market where bigger firms than it had come to grief. Third, it was faced with the frightening decision of whether to become IBM compatible or try to carve itself a niche market. It first tried to be an independent. Now, it is moving over to IBM compatibility, or as it says in advertisements, “industry standards.”

But there may be another reason. For the last few months I have been using an Apricot Fl I acquired in Hong Kong. To look at, it is a lovely machine. Small, elegant, purposeful, but in the end I sadly returned it to the distributor. It had too many problems for it to be of use to me in day-to-day work.

1. Documentation was dreadful. For a while I thought it referred to another computer. Many of the pages listed in the index simply did not exist. The directions were far from clear and did not

always agree with the help screens built into the programs. 2. The drive overheated. This occurred to such an extent that the colour of my working discs started to change from black to a chalky white — but only in the forward right-hand corner.

3. After an hour or so of use the system would bomb. That is, it would freeze solid and I would have to start all over again. This gave me The Fear and I found myself saving to disc after every sentence. 4. The screen had fuzzy lettering. Not enough to make it totally illegible, although I was never able to tell the difference between the “n” and the “m,” but enough to give me a headache if I had a long session working with the computer. 5. The keyboard and the mouse got in each others’ way. Both the keyboard and the mouse operated with infra-red rays. This seems a great idea, but I was never able

to work out how you could use both at once, and the directions did not tell me. Under normal circumstances, I would put all of the faults, except for the documentation, down to the fact that I am a shortsighted, elderly klutz.

But when I returned the machine I found the distributor in Hong Kong agreed with all of my complaints and said dozens of letters had been sent to Applied Computer Technology, which manufacturers Apricot in Britain, asking it what it could do about it.

It would appear, very little.

I was told that the Fl would be one of the computers that would be removed. from the product line-up, and I can understand why. I am sad to see a computer company run into dramas. Especially a company that produced a computer of such excellent design that, like the cavaliy, it brought a touch of class to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.

Sad, yes. Surprised, no.