"Too bad only 10,000 were ever produced,..."
More like "Too bad any were produced." ;) Someone at Apple clearly wasn't
thinking straight at all when they decided on the hardware specifications for
the Mac TV and made it the most deliberately hobbled Macintosh since the
original LC.
If it had simply been the top model of 500 series Performa in a black case with
the TV system and remote, it would've sold a whole bunch better, but limiting
it to a paltry 8 megabytes RAM at a time when other Macs and most of the PC
clones could go up to 128 meg was the dumbest thing to do.
The next big foulup on the Mac TV was limiting it to 8bit video when being used
as a computer. Then there's the TV part being limited to 16 bit color and only
usable in full screen. IIRC, the TV system available for many of the 500 series
Perfromas could be viewed in a window on the Mac's desktop.
It's like Apple really didn't want to make the Mac TV... "We've made this
terribly expensive television/computer thing. It costs a lot more than any
comparably sized television PLUS it's also a very limited capability Macintosh
computer! Isn't multimedia convergence the best thing ever?"
I guess it's the funky combination of it being a unique Apple product and at
the same time being very impractical that makes it collectible to some people.
It stands out as the tops among their failures, one that not even the most
fanatical Apple loyalists could rationalize away the faults. (But that's what
kept the pre-iPod/iPhone Apple going through its lean years. Their customers
just didn't care when the company would do something dumb that would have
ruined most any other company of similar size/market share.)
I'd like to see someone take a Mac TV, gut it and put a Mac Mini inside with a
USB ATSC TV tuner. Either keep the original CRT or replace it with the innards
from a same size SVGA CRT monitor. Bonus points if you can keep the original
Mac TV remote working with it.
The same look could be obtained by spraying a 500 case satin black and doing
the same thing.
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