Motorola follows suit on clone cuts

Not to be outdone by competitors, Motorola Computer Group (MOT) today announced price cuts of up to $300 on its StarMax line of Macintosh clones.

A price-slashing contest has broken out in the Macintosh market as Mac cloners Power Computing and Umax cut prices across their product lines earlier this week, with Power cutting prices as much as 21 percent and Umax 19 percent.

The clone makers' price cuts are in part a reaction to Apple's own price cuts of up to 27 percent on February 1.

StarMax price cuts
Model	Old	New
3000/180 Desktop Minitower	$1,395 $1,595	$1,249 $1,395
3000/200 Desktop Minitower	$1,695 $1,895	$1,495 $1,695
3000/240 Minitower	$2,495	$2,195
4000/160 Desktop Minitower	$1,895 $2,095	$1,595 $1,795
4000/200 Desktop Minitower	$2,795 $2,995	$2,495 $2,695

A Motorola StarMax 3000/180 desktop system with a 180-MHz PowerPC 603e processor, for instance, was priced at $1,395 and is now priced at $1,249. A StarMax 4000/160 with a 160-MHz 604e processor was at $1,895 and is now $1,595.

Systems in the StarMax 3000 series are based on the PowerPC 603e microprocessor running at either 180, 200, or 240 MHz, with the 240-MHz system offered in the minitower configuration only. Systems in the 4000 series are based on the PowerPC 604e microprocessor running at either 160 or 200 MHz.

All systems in the StarMax family come equipped with multimedia features including 8X CD-ROM and 16-bit stereo sound, in addition to a keyboard and mouse; each have expandable memory to 160MB.

Motorola said the price reductions are effective immediately.