Apple color computer 90s6/5/2023 ![]() ![]() With Gassée out, a rush started to quickly introduce a series of low-cost machines. Many Apple engineers had long been pressing for lower-cost options in order to build market share and increase demand across the entire price spectrum. In January 1990, Gassée resigned and his authority over product development was divided among several successors. The Christmas season of 1989 drove this point home, with the first decrease in sales in years, and an accompanying 20 percent drop in Apple's stock price for the quarter. ![]() ![]() With the "low-left" of the market it had abandoned years earlier booming with Turbo XTs, and being ignored on the high end for UNIX workstations from the likes of Sun Microsystems and SGI, Apple's fortunes of the 1980s quickly reversed. The original Macintosh plans called for a system around $1,000, but by the time it had morphed from Jef Raskin's original vision of an easy-to-use machine for composing text documents to Jobs' concept incorporating ideas gleaned during a trip to Xerox PARC, the Mac's list price had ballooned to $2,495. The high-right policy led to a series of machines with ever-increasing prices. 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. 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. Gassée long argued that Apple should not aim for the low end of the computer market, where profits were thin, but instead concentrate on the high end and higher profit margins. Gassée consistently pushed the Apple product line in two directions, towards more "openness" in terms of expandability and interoperability, and towards higher price. It was sold alongside the more powerful Macintosh Classic II in 1991 until its discontinuation the next year.Īfter Apple co-founder Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, product development was handed to Jean-Louis Gassée, formerly the manager of Apple France. ![]() The price and the availability of education software led to the Classic's popularity in education. The Classic is an adaptation of Jerry Manock's and Terry Oyama's 1984 Macintosh 128K industrial design, as had been the earlier Macintosh SE. Instead, it had a memory expansion/ FPU slot. Unlike the Macintosh SE/30 and other compact Macs before it, the Classic did not have an internal Processor Direct Slot, making it the first non-expandable desktop Macintosh since the Macintosh Plus. It is up to 25 percent faster than the Plus and included an Apple SuperDrive 3.5-inch (9 cm) floppy disk drive as standard. The Classic also featured several improvements over the aging Macintosh Plus, which it replaced as Apple's low-end Mac computer. However, it ensured compatibility with the Mac's by-then healthy software base, as well as enabled it to sell for the lower price, as planned. Apple's decision to not update the Classic with newer technology such as a newer CPU, higher RAM capacity or color display resulted in criticism from reviewers, with Macworld describing it as having "nothing to gloat about beyond its low price" and "unexceptional". The system specifications of the Classic are very similar to those of its predecessors, with the same 9-inch (23 cm) monochrome CRT display, 512 × 342 pixel resolution, and 4 megabyte (MB) memory limit of the older Macintosh computers. Production of the Classic was prompted by the success of the original Macintosh 128K, then the Macintosh Plus, and finally the Macintosh SE. It was the first Macintosh to sell for less than US$1,000. The Macintosh Classic is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from October 1990 to September 1992. ![]()
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