October 10, 1990: Mac Classic Introduced

by Chris Seibold Oct 10, 2010

In the early days of Apple Computer, the company learned that it could charge a premium for products if they were substantially better than the competition. When cheap PC clones began flooding the market, Apple's sales were slower than anticipated.

In an effort to alleviate the situation Apple released its first sub-$1000 Mac, the Mac Classic. Sharing a form factor with, and replacing the Mac SE, the Classic featured no hard drive in the base configuration, shipped with a now paltry 1MB of RAM and barely squeaked under the thousand dollar target at $999.

The machine was considered a complete dog by those in the know, but people who wanted a Mac snapped the beauties up in surprising numbers. Apple's first stab at mid-market came when the Mac Classic was introduced on October 10, 1990.

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  • Yep.  Back then MS DOS was so primitive, it was almost silly.
    Late 1990 is also about when the MacLC came out. I happily got one with a big 40 MB HDD, a small color monitor and a discounted Apple Laser Printer, all for under $3,000 and it worked wonderfully.  That was a great price when compared to the $14,000 UNISYS wanted for an upgrade to my B-26 intelligent terminal word processor with an Intel 286 chip to a much faster 386 CPU that still had no GUI like Apple had.  Finally, WYSIWYG where Adobe fonts displayed on the screen just like they would look on the page.  The desktop publishing program I needed was Aldus PageMaker (not an Adobe product until 1995) so I could create forms and design documents with ease.  I was in Mac heaven… still am.
    I’ve been Mac ever since, and have never owned a PC.

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