Re: 12C Anniversary Edition
Message #18 Posted by Jeff O. on 2 June 2006, 1:04 p.m.,
in response to message #17 by Gene
Gene,
I think I allowed myself to get caught up in some wishful thinking. With the black faceplate and the aluminum bezel, the 12c Platinum 25th looks very much like a 15c (it would have even more if only they had used the yellow "f" key and legends from the current 12c instead of the orange of the 12cp.) Having never looked closely at a 12cp, I thought its bezel was white, so when I saw the aluminum bezel on the 25th anniversary edition, I wrongly assumed that they had produced it just for that edition. Upon further review, I see that the standard 12cp uses the same aluminum bezel. So producing the 25th anniversary edition was just a simple matter of some new labelling on the standard bezel, and using the standard 12c black faceplate with the 12cp orange paint. The case was also probably relatively cheap to have produced also, so all in all, not a very expensive proposition for hp. I’m not sure of the potential market, though. I agree that hp is assured of selling lots of 12c’s or 12cp’s. Aside from “a few of us nuts”, I’d think that every 25th Anniversary Edition would represent a lost 12c or 12cp (standard version) sale. So basically whatever they spent to produce the 25th Anniversary Edition was spent to capture those few extra sales to us nuts. Based on this tenuous line of reasoning, I’ll still ascribe at least a portion of hp’s rationale for producing the 12cp 25th to customer good will. That being the case, and with my rose-colored glasses firmly in place, I’ll still hold the tiniest hope for the release of the 15c 25th Anniversary Edition early next year.
Aside from the above cost to produce and likely market, I thought you (or someone else) might take issue with my postulation that creating the 15c should be relatively easy, i.e., just plug the original 15c rom code into the current 12c electronics. A couple of years ago, there was a thread regarding conversion of the current 12c to a 15c via aftermarket modification. In that thread, the chip used in the 12c was identified as part no. 2AF1-0001, manufactured by Agilent. At the risk of showing my near complete ignorance of such things, if the 15c rom was provided to Agilent, could they not produce a 15c version of that chip fairly simply? If so, and this chip was then sent to Kinpo, would not the 15c be reborn (with some minor faceplate and key label changes)? If hp won’t do it, perhaps a third party could get Agilent to make the chip, then do the retrofit of current 12c’s as was envisioned in the thread referenced above. Anybody care to check with Agilent to get a price on the new chip? (I know, I know, price would probably be $1,000,000 for the first few, then $10 each after that in lots of 100,000.)
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