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Falling
一落千丈
After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh,
麥金塔電腦剛發布時引發了一陣熱潮，
its sales began to taper off in the second half of 1984.
但到1984年下半年，其銷量就開始急劇下滑。
The problem was a fundamental one:
問題是根本性的。
It was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer,
這是一臺雖然精美卻運行緩慢、動力不足的電腦，
and no amount of hoopla could mask that.
再多的宣傳也無法掩蓋它的缺點。
Its beauty was that its user interface looked like a sunny playroom
它的美麗之處在于，其界面看上去像一間陽光明媚的游戲室，
rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines.
而不是一塊閃爍著綠色字母和呆板命令行的幽暗屏幕。
But that led to its greatest weakness:
然而，這也造成了麥金塔最大的弱點。
A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code,
采用文本方式顯示，一個字符只占用不到一個字節；
whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted,
而Mac采用像素方式顯示用戶想要的優雅字體，
it required twenty or thirty times more memory.
這樣，每個字符所需要的內存就比前者多出二三十倍。
The Lisa handled this by shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.
麗薩電腦為了解決這一問題，將內存擴展至1000K以上，而麥金塔的內存只有128K。
Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive.
另一個問題在于，沒有內置硬盤驅動。
Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a "Xerox bigot" when she fought for such a storage device.
喬安娜·霍夫曼曾堅持，要使用內置硬盤作為存儲設備，喬布斯因此稱她為“施樂偏執狂”
He insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive.
麥金塔只有一個軟盤驅動器，
If you wanted to copy data,
你如果想要復制數據，
you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single drive.
有可能會落下肘關節發炎的毛病，因為你得來回裝卸軟盤。
In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness.
此外，麥金塔沒有風扇，這是喬布斯武斷頑固的又一佐證。
Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer.
他覺得，風扇會增大電腦的嗓音。
This caused many component failures
沒有風扇散熱造成了很多組件故障，
and earned the Macintosh the nickname "the beige toaster,"
并讓麥金塔贏得了“米色烤面包機”的綽號，
which did not enhance its popularity.
而這一綽號顯然無益于提髙產品的流行度。
It was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few months,
麥金塔電腦外形誘人，因而在發布的頭幾個月，銷量非常好；
but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell.
但當人們逐漸認識到這款電腦的局限后，銷量便逐漸減少。
As Hoffman later lamented,
霍夫曼后來感嘆道：
"The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits."
“現實扭曲力場可以作為一種鞭策，但最后總是要被現實打破的。”
At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten thousand a month,
1984年底，麗薩電腦銷量幾乎為零，麥金塔的銷量跌至每月10000臺以下，
Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation.
喬布斯在絕望之下作出了一個低劣、不合規矩的決定。
He decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program,
他決定在庫存的麗薩電腦上安裝麥金塔仿真程序，
and sell them as a new product, the "Macintosh XL."
并作為新產品出售，命名為“麥金塔XL”。
Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be restarted,
由于麗薩電腦已停產，且不會再投入生產，
it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in.
因此喬布斯這次要做自己都不看好的東西，就有點反常。
"I was furious because the Mac XL wasn't real," said Hoffman.
“我很憤怒，因為它根本就不是什么Mac XL。”霍夫曼說道，
"It was just to blow the excess Lisas out the door.
“這么做的目的就是為了把剩下的麗薩電腦都賣出去。
It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax, so I resigned."
它賣得很好，但接下來我們不得不停止這個可怕的騙局，我也因此辭職了。”
