In the normal sense of the term, it is of course absurd to suggest that the Mac Plus was a road apple - when it first came out in March 1986, it was the coolest microcomputer on the planet. However, it can be argued that the subsequent development of Mac hardware would have been a lot happier if the Mac Plus had been phased out a lot sooner.
In April 1987, the fifth variant of the all-in-one Mac box, the Mac SE, was launched. This had many, many advantages over the Mac Plus, some of which would only come to light in subsequent years: The SE had 1. An internal fan, to stop the power board getting too hot. Noone particularly cared at the time, but nowadays I feel I can only run my Mac Plus for an hour at a time, without the circult board beginning to dry out the solder blobs. 2. Space for a second internal floppy or hard drive. Although it is possible, with the aid of 4M of RAM and a boot floppy that sets up a system RAM disk, to get by with a Mac Plus and no external HD20-SC, the nightmare of the ever-lasting disk swap requests is never very far away. Amazingly, we can only surmise that people at the time put up with this incubus, because external hard and floppy disk drives for the Mac Plus are much rarer on the second-hand market than Mac Plus units themselves. 3. A battery that lasted maybe ten years, instead of just two. Although it requires surgery to change the clock battery of a Mac SE, whereas the Plus had a removable battery cover, so few people bother to change the rare and expensive 4.5 volt battery for their Plus that this factor is definitely in favour of the SE. 4. Standard ADB keyboards and mice. It's not obvious what you can do with a Mac Plus that has no mouse (even if Steve Jobs designed the Mac to make the keyboard as close as possible to unnecessary), but with a Mac SE you can buy a replacement keyboard second-hand for a pound. 5. Control and Escape keys on the keyboard, allowing the Mac SE to be used as a Telnet terminal even once it had become obsolete. To use a Mac Plus in the same way, you had to spend ages hunting for an old copy of Red Ryder or a similarly ancient comms application. 6. A brand new analogue power/sweep board. The importance of this is not so obvious nowadays, but at the time it was possible to upgrade a Mac 128K to a 512K, a 512K to a 512KE, and a 512KE to a Mac Plus, all for less money than it would take to buy a brand new Mac from scratch. There was no upgrade path from a Mac Plus to a Mac SE, so anyone who bought a Mac Plus late in its product cycle was stuck with a machine that was by then obsolescent. I only hope that Apple offered enough of a discount on the Mac Plus to make this worthwhile. The Mac SE was phased out in 1989, in favour of a new model, almost identical apart from the support for a high-density floppy drive. Both this new Mac SE and the Mac Plus were replaced in 1990 by the Mac Classic. Low End Macs compares the Classic with the SE FDHD, notes the inferiority of the later machine, and promptly designates it a road apple. However, if the Classic is viewed as a replacement for the Mac Plus, its placement in the Apple product line makes a lot more sense. At long last, a lot of obsolete hardware was being phased out. The Classic was cheap, clearly aimed at the bottom end of the market where the Plus had previously been positioned. Furthermore, the Classic retains the ability to boot System 1.1, and any amount of other obsolete rubbish that a true Mac fan might have rescued off his original 512K Mac before switching jobs. I would like to dispute the Mac Classic's inclusion in the list of The Ten Worst Macs Ever, and state that if the Mac Plus had not been kept on life support for the best part of five years, the cheap machine intended to bring Mac computing to the masses would have had a much better pedigree, and much better design. -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:compact.macs@mail.maclaunch.com> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
