Sorry for the really long post. This an ultra interesting discussion.
LC/LCIIs deserve the criticism they get - even with period correct software, they are slow.
Yeah, so, with the original LCs, "slow" is kind of a relative thing, too. Like, if you have an early LC, it probably shipped with 7.0 or 7.0.1 on it, it'll run system 6 easily enough - which might actually be a better use case for it than system 7, especially anything after 7.1.
But, I mean, they cost a lot less than the other modular Macs at the time, had color, had the slot for IIe or ethernet. I guess it depends on the criticism. I mean, Apple
could hypothetically have put faster guts in them, but JLG didn't even want the LC to exist, and was pushing really hard during his time in Apple's leadership to get 55% margins, creating the chant "55 or die" which is
probably why the LC launched at like $2500, which was like a third of what a IIci was selling for and a bit over half what a IIsi cost, but also still kind of a lot for something that wasn't actually as fast as the only other '020 Apple ever built.
Thinking back to those days is kinda funny, the attitude seemed to be "we need to teach computers" so they bought computers with very little regard to what they would actually be used for or were capable of. Our computer classes involved either simply typing documents or more commonly, games...they were often forgotten in a corner until there was some free time to play Tank Wars, the modern equivalent to setting up a Playstation in a classroom.
It seems like the most common conception of "teaching computers" really does involve teaching, mechanically, how to use computers to accomplish work, and doesn't necessarily involve thinking about work different because computers exist, and hasn't maybe since some time in the '80s really involved much in the way of programming.
My K-12 schools was structured similarly to what a lot of people are describing here. One or two computers in the library for card catalog usage, a couple office computers, each teacher had a computer (sometimes two, depending), a flagship computer lab, sometimes a secondary lab created out of what fell out of the flagship lab most recently, and then most classrooms had two, sometimes three computers hanging around in the back of the room.
We had LCs in the flagship lab until ~1998-1999 and they were "fine". We did ClarisWorks stuff and HyperCard+HyperScript on them, had networked home directories, at first via LocalTalk and then via Ethernet. Those were replaced with Dells running NT4 and I found out later all the LCs moved to a manufactured building at the back of the campus because some classes still wanted to use them.
I need to go get it, but I have an original LC and it's also "fine". It's not my very first choice, compared to an 840av or any powermac but it runs 7.1 and a lot of the Claris stuff I like well enough. Really, I think in the early '90s outside of education specifically where kid games and edutainment were important, I think we might be underestimating just how much ClarisWorks was really doing for people.
I think that how you go with this really depends. A lot of what I've seen on this front is memorizing how to do $TASK by rote and not thinking about how to use a computer to solve problems, and, maybe more critically, getting people to think of powerful Office applications in any way other than as a typewriter. MS Office in particular is capable of a lot of automation and really powerful stuff that people leave K-12 and university not knowing how to use or how to think about. And, what's worse is that that third party training courses like the ones from Lynda/LinkedIn Learning are
really good at this particular kind of instruction but we're not at a point where "I took the Lynda Word course" is a good proxy for being suitable for doing computer office work. So, that's not necessarily a solution, it's just a good resource.
I came up with a list of prospective Macs starting in about 1990 going through the 68k era, and I replaced the components with what I thought should have been what the specs of each of the machines.
So, there's an interesting undercurrent here about just putting better technology in the basic computers and it's interesting to think about how that would've gone. I continue to maintain that the basic Macs were "fine", especially if you had existing system6-based workflows or whatever.
My personal take here is that
adding models probably isn't the right way to go about it. If it were me, I'd take a good long look at
what was available, in, say, 1990, and then start cutting. (1990 has this less bad than, say, 1992, but my point stands for basically the entire decade between 1987 and 1997.)
If you aren't selling three models of SE, for example, you can get away with charging less for them through volume. If you're worried about the IIsi eating some of your IIci sales, just don't sell it. (And, I legitimately believe Apple was kind of worried about this in 1990, in a way they claim since 1998 or so not to have been.)
The other problem is Apple leaving old models in place too long. Arguably by, like, 1992, the Quadra 700 and 900 are the "fast" computers and reviews in 1992 comparing the Performa 600/IIvx to the IIci acknowledge that the IIci was several years old by then. Maybe the solution was to build the IIvx/P600 by refreshing+nerfing the IIci platform instead of leaving the IIci in place. Though, there's some "040 supply issues" going on there which is most, IIRC, of why the IIci was still on sale to begin with.
The question is basically, who you leave out and when do you choose to leave money on the table, and if you leave money on the table by, say, just dropping the IIci board into your Mac IIcd/IIvx or whatever and pricing it what the IIvx/P600 cost, are you possibly saving money by not doing development on a new unique model or by basing the new model on a revision of something a little more tried and true? (well, "tried and true" is the wrong phrase here. the IIvi/vx/P600 worked well, they just weren't as fast because their architecture comes from the LC series with NuBus and a better RAM controller added on, which is why they do about half what a IIci will in benchmarks, but, the IIci is already superceded by the Quadra 700, so I feel like just killing it in favor of the CDROM machine would've been fine and it would probably have cost Apple similarly either way, at least in terms of engineering costs, because you do kind of still arguably have to fix up the VRAM situation.)
To be honest though, I think there's a reasonable argument Apple wasn't thinking these through clearly. There's also the admitted benefit of hindsight being 20/20 in these kinds of scenarios, and we don't necessarily know what conditions or information Apple was working on when it was planning things in the '90s.
(IIvi followed by the IIvx ??).
I've always thought of the IIvi and IIvx as sort of parallel models, meant for different international markets. It's my recollection that the IIvi never actually sold in the US, instead, it was for more cost-sensitive European markets, where the IIvx and Performa 600 did sell in the US.
In regards to the 6200/6300/6400 series, I can only say that I was looking for a new computer in 1995 and I went into a computer store to test out various machines.
The 6300/100-120 launched in 1996 and the 6400 launched in 1997. A 6300/100 should perform approximately as well as a 7200 and a 6400 should do better than any 7200, perhaps unless you wrench things to the max and have a 7200/120 with a generous L2 cache and a cacheles 6400/180 or 6360/160. (The cacheless 6400 was, again, primarily for cost-conscious markets and it's my understanding that relatively few cacheless 6400s sold in the US.)
The 6100 and 6200 have basicaly the same performance at PowerPC code.
The 6300 was a huge boost from the 6100-6200 but wasn't really a meaningful break from the architecture, and that whole "603 upgrade on an 040 machine adapted forward from an 030 platform" aspect of it does really hold it back compared to things like the PCI 604s, but it's anybody's guess as to how, say, a 6300/120 vs. 7200/120 showdown would go, I just don't have those machines on hand to try.
The other issue here is that given that you had the knowledge/expertise and resources to do that kind of indicates you really were a 7000/8000 customer anyway, and might even have been able to justify going up to a 7500/100. That kind of smooth product gradient is a lot of why people laud '90s Apple, for having a product in every price bracket and for every need. And, the 6200 was for people whose needs were more simple and involved fewer legacy software applications than yours did at the time.
That's not a failing of the 6200 per se, it's just how it shook down because it was cheap. (i.e. people need to stop expecting that the cheapest Mac will always be equal to the best Mac in terms of performance.)
If anyone here has a 6x00 series computer, we could run some 68k emulation and PPC benchmarks on different machines and post the results. Would be an interesting excercise.
I've got a 6220/75 and in macbench 4 it returns almost the same results as my 6100. It's within a few percentage points. I've also got a 7200/90, but not a /75 or /120 or any cache for that machine.
I'm totally interested in workshopping some ideas for how to test 68k emulation performance. My initial thought was an older version of MacBench targeted to 68k Macs. MB4 is from 1998 and so everything is scaled so that a 6100 or 6200 gets roughly 100 and a G3/300 gets roughly 1000, and everything else falls between, up to the 8600/300 which gets you like 750 in floating point and 480 or so in integer compute. (Which is the other thing, too, you have to remember just how insanely huge the G3 leap was, which is the other half of why the 6100 and 6200 (and probably the 7100/66) just look so bad.
It's apparent Jobs realized the pricing schema was a huge issue when he took over, introducing the Power Macintosh G3 at a staggeringly low figure for an Apple flagship station. I wonder how thin the margins were there on those machines, or even the iMac for that matter...
Two notes:
The Beige G3s actually started out "just" a couple hundo less than what they were replacing, if not the same price. Prices dropped like a brick by almost a thousand dollars in well under a year though as most of the rest of the Mac lineup got discontinued and Apple was saving absolute raftloads of money *And* G3s were worth every penny as replacements to the 7300/7600 and 8600 and everything underneath. In addition, there was a *lot* of shared componentry between the different G3 models, compared to, say, the way the 7300/7600/8600 had been built with unique motherboards.
I suspect Apple was making a killing, for a lot of different reasons. Cloning had ended. The G3 chip, Mac OS 8, Jobs, the MS agreement, and ultimately the iMac had all served to totally reinvigorate the Mac platform. The (WS/PDQ) PowerBook G3s (which were re-factored Beige G3s) were arguably the best laptops Apple had ever built at that point, and had lots of meaningful quality of life boosts like 14-inch 1024x768 displays, better cardbus support, dual battery capabilities back in from the 500 series, among other things, and of course that huge speed boost.
I think the real question is whether or not that kind of whole-stack product line reimagination would have been possible in 1996, or 1995, or even 1993 or 1992, or was it made possible in a unique way by a nominally "low end" completely clobbering everything enabling the entire product line of ~25+ machines to consolidate down to three basically overnight. (The 6500 survived the cull for a few months but let's be real here, the Beige G3 as a home bundle would've filled that slot fine. The 9600 was killed and then unkilled if I remember correctly due to demand for a 6-slot Mac, but it did poorly and that was only a couple months because the vast majority of Mac users decided they wanted fast more than slots.) UMAX S900s were stuck in the channel at bargain-basement prices until like late 1999 or early 2001, at which point you needed a PowerMac G4's worth of money on top of the S900's selling price to upgrade it to be suitable to run Mac OS X anyway
Some of these questions aren't fully answerable due to confounding factors like the IIci's graphics system arguably needing to be replaced and it not having sound either. The IIci also was kept around in part due to 040 supply issues pushing the Q700 and Q900 prices extraordinarily high. I believe it was like $7200/$10600 (might be slightly misremembering these numbers but they were Up There) or so to the IIci's 6000ish, that late.
