乔布斯传 第176期:一落千丈

 Falling

一落千丈
After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh,
麦金塔电脑刚发布时引发了一阵热潮，
its sales began to taper 1 off in the second half of 1984.
但到1984年下半年，其销量就开始急剧下滑。
The problem was a fundamental one:
问题是根本性的。
It was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer,
这是一台虽然精美却运行缓慢、动力不足的电脑，
and no amount of hoopla could mask that.
再多的宣传也无法掩盖它的缺点。
Its beauty was that its user interface 2 looked like a sunny playroom
它的美丽之处在于，其界面看上去像一间阳光明媚的游戏室，
rather than a somber 3 dark screen with sickly green pulsating 4 letters and surly command lines.
而不是一块闪烁着绿色字母和呆板命令行的幽暗屏幕。
双语有声读物 乔布斯传
But that led to its greatest weakness:
然而，这也造成了麦金塔最大的弱点。
A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code,
采用文本方式显示，一个字符只占用不到一个字节；
whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted,
而Mac采用像素方式显示用户想要的优雅字体，
it required twenty or thirty times more memory.
这样，每个字符所需要的内存就比前者多出二三十倍。
The Lisa handled this by shipping 5 with more than 1,000K RAM 6, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.
丽萨电脑为了解决这一问题，将内存扩展至1000K以上，而麦金塔的内存只有128K。
Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive.
另一个问题在于，没有内置硬盘驱动。
Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a "Xerox 7 bigot" when she fought for such a storage device.
乔安娜·霍夫曼曾坚持，要使用内置硬盘作为存储设备，乔布斯因此称她为“施乐偏执狂”
He insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy 8 disk drive.
麦金塔只有一个软盘驱动器，
If you wanted to copy data,
你如果想要复制数据，
you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap 9 floppy disks in and out of the single drive.
有可能会落下肘关节发炎的毛病，因为你得来回装卸软盘。
In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness.
此外，麦金塔没有风扇，这是乔布斯武断顽固的又一佐证。
Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer.
他觉得，风扇会增大电脑的嗓音。
This caused many component 10 failures
没有风扇散热造成了很多组件故障，
and earned the Macintosh the nickname "the beige toaster,"
并让麦金塔赢得了“米色烤面包机”的绰号，
which did not enhance its popularity.
而这一绰号显然无益于提髙产品的流行度。
It was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few months,
麦金塔电脑外形诱人，因而在发布的头几个月，销量非常好；
but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell.
但当人们逐渐认识到这款电脑的局限后，销量便逐渐减少。
As Hoffman later lamented 11,
霍夫曼后来感叹道：
"The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits."
“现实扭曲力场可以作为一种鞭策，但最后总是要被现实打破的。”
At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten thousand a month,
1984年底，丽萨电脑销量几乎为零，麦金塔的销量跌至每月10000台以下，
Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation.
乔布斯在绝望之下作出了一个低劣、不合规矩的决定。
He decided 12 to take the inventory 13 of unsold Lisas, graft 14 on a Macintosh-emulation program,
他决定在库存的丽萨电脑上安装麦金塔仿真程序，
and sell them as a new product, the "Macintosh XL."
并作为新产品出售，命名为“麦金塔XL”。
Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be restarted,
由于丽萨电脑已停产，且不会再投入生产，
it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in.
因此乔布斯这次要做自己都不看好的东西，就有点反常。
"I was furious because the Mac XL wasn't real," said Hoffman.
“我很愤怒，因为它根本就不是什么Mac XL。”霍夫曼说道，
"It was just to blow the excess Lisas out the door.
“这么做的目的就是为了把剩下的丽萨电脑都卖出去。
It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax 15, so I resigned."
它卖得很好，但接下来我们不得不停止这个可怕的骗局，我也因此辞职了。”