When the product finally shipped after years of hype, users were dismayed to find that to install it requires a machine with 2.5 MB of RAM minimum, and needed 4 MB to run well. This is the maximum available RAM in many Mac systems of the era. Removing unneeded components do little to address this, and AOCE and the other Apple technology, QuickDraw GX, typically could not be run together because of a lack of memory. While newer machines were able to run AOCE more comfortably, as an email system intended to be run on diverse networks of non-homogeneous machines the requirements greatly impaired market acceptance. Simply downloading and installing separate stand-alone client applications for each mail system the user actually had would use considerably less disk space, and had no constant memory footprint.