Finally, after a year of waiting, Applesauce units are available once again! The year has proven to be extremely difficult to acquire the parts needed to produce Applesauce. I have been slowly gathering what I needed over the last 7 months or so, but between the worldwide chip shortage and overall chaos due to COVID-19 this has proven to be a challenge. And to add to the complexity, huge price increases and import tariffs have made it much more costly to produce. But, with everything finally in hand I am finally able to get some new units out into the world. There aren’t a lot of them, but hopefully enough to satisfy the current demand.
For this production run there is a completely new set of PCBs that bring with them the ability to use 34-pin PC floppy drives in addition to the Apple II and Mac drives that were supported in earlier revisions of the hardware. This makes Applesauce compatible with a wider range of floppy drives than any other disk imaging solution. For owners of previous revisions, upgrade kits are available. But note that if you don’t need to use PC drives, then there is no real benefit to upgrading. Your current hardware will continue to be supported 100% and will receive all major new features.
There are also new sync sensors available for Shugart-based Disk II drives and the UniDisk 5.25 (A9M0104 and A9M0107).
Each unit takes about 45 minutes to assemble, test, and pack so it isn’t a fast process to fulfill orders. I will be shipping orders out every day, but depending on the order backlog it may take several days to a week to get your order shipped, so please be patient. There is also a pretty lengthy wait list, and wait list orders will be given priority over other orders.
I have been working hard on adding more content and information to the website, so feel free to look around. I’ll be continuing to add more between processing orders.
For those of you hearing about Applesauce for the first time, you can read about what makes Applesauce special on the What is Applesauce? page.
Thanks to all of you for your support of the Applesauce project!
