Classic upgrades

[cofford]

I've had this Classic since my mom bought it in 1990. I recapped the logic and analog boards and found it to be as limiting as I remember. So, when an opportunity to grab a Classic II board came up I jumped at it. Recapped that board yesterday and she's looking good. Still running the OS off of the original Quantum 40MB drive which shows no signs of slowing down. I replaced the CRT and it still needs a few magnet adjustments.

Hopefully this will prevent me from spending a lot of money on an SE/30. Heh.

 

[joshc]

The Classic II is a nice little machine. The only major drawback is no PDS slot, but PDS upgrades for the SE/30 are expensive/hard to find anyway, and I can see you already seem to have your Classic II on a LocalTalk network?

 

[superjer2000]

The main drawback is the Classic ii is still dog slow. The SE30 is probsbly twice as fast in regular usage for most tasks. Somebody did a YouTube video that shows them side by side and it feels worse in person. It’s ridiculous that Apple crippled the memory datapath in the Classic ii, lc ii, and color Classic.

 

[cheesestraws]

The SE30 is probsbly twice as fast in regular usage for most tasks

The SE/30 was also about twice the price, IIRC, so this isn't entirely surprising...

 

[joshc]

It’s ridiculous that Apple crippled the memory datapath in the Classic ii, lc ii, and color Classic.

On the other hand, they were more than suitable for the tasks they were intended for, in relation to the price and where they sat amonsgt the competition / Apple's product line. All of these computers are still enjoyable too, depending on what you're intending on doing with them.

In some cases, depending on configuration, the SE/30 would've been as much as four times the price of the Classic II when it was launched, and still an expensive used buy when the Classic II came out, far out of reach of most ordinary home users.

 

[superjer2000]

The only reason why Apple did it was to preserve their margins. The original Mac came out in 1984 and in 1990 when they introduced the Classic the increase in processor speed after six years was exactly zero. They could have bumped the Classic to 16mhz but they saw no reason to. Adding the extra lines to make the Classic II and Color Classic more usable machines would not have added much build cost. The Color Classic came out in 1993 for goodness sakes so there is no rational argument that it shouldn’t at least have had the same performance of the SE/30 that came out FOUR YEARS earlier. They finally came to their senses with the LC III and I feel sorry for the poor bastards that had bought an LC II.

I have an SE/30 and a Classic II and would argue they aren’t that comparable. To me the speed gap feels less between a Classic and a Classic II than a Classic II and an SE/30.

 

[joshc]

They could have bumped the Classic to 16mhz but they saw no reason to.

The Classic's design was largely driven by the desire to reduce cost. The Classic was based on the SE to save cost, just in cut down form using surface mount technology. They even removed an ADB port to reduce cost. Yes, one port, to reduce cost. They removed the brightness knob to reduce cost too. If they were skimping on things like a potentiometer and an ADB socket, there's no way they were going to spend extra money on a faster CPU, even if it was only an extra few dollars per machine (actually not sure what the difference would've been back then). The Classic power supply is of a significantly cheaper design than the one used in the SE, again they cheapened it in every way possible. There's no way they were going to give people anything more than they perceived they needed - remember, Apple knows best for everybody involved, same philosophy as today. So you never would've seen a 16mhz CPU in a machine like the Classic, especially with the $999 price tag.

The Classic was *originally* going to be a $2000 machine until they changed course and decided it would be a budget oriented product. They were obviously onto something - the Classic was massively successful, selling in very high numbers to home users and schools. And that's really my point, at $999, if someone wanted a cheap Mac at the time, to do the things a Mac was known for doing (paint, draw, write), the Classic did all those things just fine. It wouldn't have been a $999 machine with a 16mhz CPU, not with the margins Apple want to maintain. We tend to look back and nostalgia / retrospection clouds our view of things - yep, the Classic wasn't a fast machine even in 1990, but it was never meant to be. It was meant to be a cheap machine to help Apple gain market share in key markets like education and the home at a time when they were getting annihalted by cheap PC clones, and that's what it did.