are Classics especially prone to hardware failure?

[bigmessowires]

Of the first 20 results in today's New Posts list, six of them are about Classic variants with hardware problems or seeking replacement hardware. 6/20 seems like an unusually high fraction for a single Mac category. I've also seen a few people mention that they tend to avoid Classics for hardware reliability reasons. What's the scoop?

 

[cheesestraws]

Boiled down to its essence, it is that the Classic is the SE with every corner cut possible in the interests of cost so it just about still worked.

The analogue board is built particularly cheaply, but the whole thing is definitely cost-engineered.

 

[zigzagjoe]

The earlier compacts were engineered as a mainstream/flagship products, where classics are cost-reduced systems in a familiar form factor with a niche audience. They were built to cost, and owe more to the mindset of the LC class systems than they do prior machines.

As an example: The SE and Mac Classic are similar at face value, yet the classic cost around a third as much as the SE 3 years later. While costs come down over time, Apple also cut things to the bone to make the price point. The analog boards in particular have to handle both AC->DC as well as the CRT driving, with both functions just sufficient to meet the lifetime of the product. As they age there's little buffer before they go out of tolerances.

 

[Phipli]

Short answer... Yes.

Long answer... finding a working one is a pleasant surprise but if you're in the market, buy an SE instead. Identical performance, better parts, has an expansion slot.

 

[Daniël]

Classics have the double whammy of very shitty capacitors. Not just the SMD ones on the mainboard, as to be expected of any device with electrolytic SMD caps of that era, but the ones on the analog board too. They're some of the few through hole capacitors that can still leak as bad as its SMD brethren, causing oxidation damage on the analog board.

Classic IIs use the same caps, reusing the analog boards from the Classic, and are every bit as unreliable. I don't hate these machines, but I do hate the unreliability. Working ones for some reason go for stupid money from the few I've seen for sale here in the Netherlands, even if left unrestored.

If it wasn't for the absolute need for repairs and the cost, it would be a perfectly decent Mac for the minimalist or beginner 68k Mac collector.

 

[Scott Baret]

They were designed to be cheap.

The Classic is essentially a repackaged SE SuperDrive with a bunch of features missing (expansion slot, second floppy, second ADB port). There are some very obvious cost-cutting measures such as the smaller board, inferior power supply (compare it to the Sony in the SE!), bad capacitors, lack of a brightness knob, and the daughterboard for RAM.

It's really no different than the top-loading NES, which got rid of some features and was designed to be cheap.