In 1990, Apple introduced the Mac LC as a lower cost, color machine; in fact LC stood for Low-cost Color. Apple had inexpensive Macs (the Classic was only $1000), and very expensive Macs (the IIfx was $10,000), but had no affordable machines in between. The LC was hatched to fill that void, costing about $3000 with a color monitor. A monochrome display was also offered for those focusing on the low cost aspect of the machine.

The machine's styling is halfway between the old SnowWhite designs, and the new Espresso designs, as was the Classic's and the IIsi. This is the "pizza box" look used on subsequent LC's and the IIsi.

The LC, like the Mac II, was powered by the 68020 chip. This made it about twice as fast as the Classic and SE, but a tad slower than the 68030 based machines. It could not use virtual memory, but was 32-bit clean.

The LC was offered configured as a dual floppy system, or with a single floppy and a 40MB or 80 MB hard disk drive. Expansion slots were limited to four: two 30-pin RAM slots, a video RAM upgrade slot, and a single '020 PDS slot. One of the unusual cards that could be put into the LC's PDS slot was an Apple IIe emulation card. This card, along with an Apple II disk drive, allowed one to run Apple II programs on the Mac, thus bridging the gap of Mac and Apple II, and luring some Apple II owners over to the Mac.

As time went on, the LC series became and education-only series. The consumer versions of these machines were called Performa, and only differed in the included software and labeling.

The above machine is an LC with 6MB RAM, 40MB HDD, 512K VRAM, Apple IIe emulation card and the Apple 12" monochrome display.

• Machine: Apple Macintosh LC
• Processor: Motorola 68020 @ 16 MHz
• RAM: 2MB - 10MB
• Display: bit-mapped 512 x 348 at 256 colors (thousands with optional 256K VRAM upgrade); 640 x 480 at 16 colors (256 colors with VRAM upgrade)
• Storage: built in dual 1.44MB floppy disk, single 1.44MB floppy disk and 40MB or 80 MB hard disk
• Expansion slots: two 30-pin RAM, one VRAM, one 68020 PDS
• Ports:two serial, monitor, SCSI, ADB, audio in, audio out, PDS (on this machine the IIe connecter is here. Could be for ethernet, video board, etc...)
• Operator Input: 81 key ADB keyboard
• Cost (as shown): $2399+ ($3349)
• Production: 1990-1992 17 total months, unknown quantity.

A pretty clean design. The front kicked up a few degrees for looks. The bar under the front was added just before production so a floppy disk could be put in the machine without the keyboard in the way.

Rear of the machine showing the ports: AC, video, serial printer, serial modem, SCSI, ADB, sound in, sound out, IIe emulator.

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Please note: All photographs and info are copyright 1996-2000 Justin Mayrand - if you would like to copy items, e-mail me with which one and what you would like to do with it, I should be back to you in 24 hours. Thanks!