Macintosh LC

The Macintosh LC (meaning low-cost color) is Apple Computer's product family of low-end consumer Macintosh personal computers in the early 1990s. The original Macintosh LC was released in October 1990 and was the first affordable color-capable Macintosh. Due to its affordability and Apple II compatibility the LC was adopted primarily in the education and home markets. Together with the Mac IIsi, it introduced built-in audio input on the Mac. The "LC" name was subsequently used for a line of low-end Macintosh computers for several years and spanned the 68k to PowerPC transition.

History

After Apple co-founder Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, product development was handed to Jean-Louis Gassée, formerly manager of Apple France. Gassée consistently pushed the Apple product line in two directions, towards more "openness" in terms of expandability and interoperability, and towards higher price. Gassée long argued that Apple should not market their computers towards the low end of the market, where profits were thin, but instead concentrate on the high end and higher profit margins. He illustrated the concept using a graph showing the price/performance ratio of computers with low-power, low-cost machines in the lower left and high-power high-cost machines in the upper right. The "high-right" goal became a mantra among the upper management, who said "fifty-five or die", referring to Gassée's goal of a 55 percent profit margin.

Macintosh Quadra 605

The Quadra 605 is an entry level 68040 microprocessor-based Apple Macintosh personal computer code-named "Aladdin" or "Primus" which was released on October 21, 1993 as part of the Quadra series and discontinued on October 16, 1994. It is one of few Macintosh models to not share a case with another machine (although the internal layout is shared with the Performa/LC 475 family.)

Specifications

Macintosh Quadra 630

The Macintosh Quadra 630 (Codenames: "Crusader", "Show Biz", "Show & Tell"; also sold with minor variations as the Macintosh LC 630 in the educational market and as the Macintosh Performa 630 in the consumer market) is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's (now Apple Inc.) Quadra series of Macintosh computers. It was introduced in July 1994, replacing the Quadra 610, and was discontinued in October 1995 with no direct replacement; however, the Power Macintosh 6200 and its Performa versions took a very similar position in Apple's product lineup later, and continued using the new case introduced with the 630. The case design made the system's motherboard accessible by opening a cover at the bottom rear of the case and sliding out a drawer that the motherboard was mounted on.

The 630 was the last Quadra Macintosh introduced, though the earlier 950 remained available longer. A big change compared to previous Macintosh models was the choice of the internal hard drive interface: conforming to the standards of the IBM PC compatible platform, cheaper, but slower IDE drives were used instead of SCSI for the first time. An external SCSI port was still available on the machines, and the CD-ROM used SCSI internally, but the 630 used an older controller that was much slower than the ones used in higher-end Macs of the time.