Macintosh LC - History

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.

This policy led to a series of ever more expensive computers. This was in spite of strenuous objections within the company, and when a group at Claris started a low-end Mac project called "Drama", Gassée actively killed it. By the 1990, with sales slumping, arguments broke out over whether or not the high-right goal should be maintained. In the end, Gassée was forced from the company and Michael Spindler was given his position, with the job of producing a low-cost series of machines. The result was the Macintosh Classic, Macintosh IIsi, and the LC.

The original LC was an attempt at an affordable, modular, color-capable Macintosh. As such, when compared with earlier Macs Apple cut some corners on performance and features in order to keep the price down. The LC's system specifications nearly duplicated those of the 3 year old Macintosh II. Nevertheless, the machine hit a sweet spot and, with the pent-up demand for a low-cost Macintosh, it was a strong seller. In 1991 was succeeded by the LC II, which replaced the LC's Motorola 68020 processor with a 68030. It retained the original LC's 16-bit system bus however, making its performance roughly the same as the earlier model. The main benefit of the 030 processor in the LC II was the ability to use System 7's virtual memory feature. In spite of this, the new model sold even better than the LC.

The success of the LC II spawned a whole series of LC models, most of which later were sold both with the LC name to the education world and to consumers via traditional Apple dealers, and as Performa to the consumer market via electronics stores, and department stores such as Sears. (For example, the LC 475 was also known as the Performa 475.) The last official "LC" was the Power Macintosh 5300/100 LC, which was released in August 1995 and discontinued in April 1996. The LC 580 was notable for being the last desktop 680x0-based Macintosh of any kind. All subsequent Macintoshes used PowerPC processors and, later, Intel processors.