"Your Macintosh was the xxth manufactured during the..." or was it?

[jsarchibald]

When I started comparing serial numbers for known Drexel 128K Macs, I noticed something interesting - they were all week 6 of 1984, and I found one on the M0001 Registry, the one that sold on eBay last year, and a fellow members Drexel. They were the 4330th, 2585th, and 3510th made that week. Mine however appears to be 435th made. Now if they only made 1850, they must not have been made sequentially. However, the serials are all divisible by 5, so it must have gone down a particular line for the Drexel Macs.

This tells me that there were probably 5 different lines in Fremont for construction. So really, was mine the 435th made that week? Has our belief of when a particular unit was made been wrong all of these years? Could mine have been the 87th? Can we believe in anything any longer?

Just some food for thought.

 

[Carboy7]

:O

Who can I even believe now? Can I trust you? Other forum members? Me?

 

[unity]

I dont know how the lines were setup. And I never really looked into serials mathematically. But I know I have SEs that are back to back made. So I think we can assume the original Mac was the same way, that is when decoded they count is by one. It could be coincidence that the Drexels listed are all ending in 5 or 0. Need more Drexel serials to be sure! As to when they were made, no one can say. I am certain they did not start on day one of the week making the Drexels. Meaning they could have started on Tuesday, etc. But if the rule of 5 works, then Drexels could be serialized over 9,000 of week X. Or week 5/week 7.

I would love to see if we could get Drexel Owners together and collect serials, etc.

 

[jsarchibald]

I'm sure the silkscreening was done by one particular line, and later utilised across the board for the Macintosh ED and Plus models with silkscreening on the front.

I personally think we may have seen behind the curtain to an extent, and I am starting to be confident that there were 5 different lines the compacts were made on.

 

[jsarchibald]

Further to this, I bought a bulk lot from a guy with a Mac Plus, and it came with a ton of paperwork and disks.  Interestingly, there was a M0110 keyboard in the original Picasso box, the Picasso tray with disks and manuals, and it all came in a Picasso box.  Turns out the guy bought a 512K new in 1985, and when it was stolen in 1988, his insurance paid him out and he got a Mac Plus.

I was always under the impression that the compacts came with a mouse and keyboard around the same week, but my recent Drexel purchase has this split between Week 2, 5 and 6 of 1984, so I was left wondering.  This latest conquest had paperwork for both systems, and I got the following:

Macintosh Plus - Week 22, 1988

Mouse - Week 50, 1987

Keyboard - Week 14, 1988

Macintosh 512K - Week 6, 1985

Mouse - Week 2, 1985

Keyboard - Week 1, 1985

He purchased both of these systems new, so I have no reason to doubt the accuracy.  But a discrepancy of almost 6 months on the Plus is baffling!

 

[unity]

Not really. When Macs first came out, the mice and keyboard had a small head start in production. Then Apple streamlined things for a bit and serials started to line up better. Then in late 1984 they started to drift a bit. By the time the Plus came out, there is no telling where each was even made. The keyboard or mouse where not being produced not only in the US but in Singapore and Ireland. And the Mac itself, same thing. So now we are talking global production. To also add plants were shutdown and start up. When I worked production, if we had a shutdown coming up for a particular line and needed to re-tool, we would try to double up on output with parts. Then during shutdown, other lines would still have a supply on hand. At this was with a very stream-lined, "just-in-time", production line.

So as Apple shifted production around, I can see them ramping up some places, like mice, then stop producing mice for a while while they shifted something.

Really serials need to be taken with a grain of salt. While I do track each of my early Macs serials and component serials, thats only for the 128k. After that - eh...

 

[Scott Baret]

I have three complete Macs with their original mouse and keyboard. All three are pretty close to each other in terms of manufacture date, but I seem to recall the Plus's mouse being a little bit older than the keyboard and main unit. The SE and LC have keyboards and mice within a week or two of each other (although I can't really be certain with the SE since it has that serial number style where it isn't easy to tell the manufacture--plus SEs were sold with separate keyboards so I guess it really doesn't count there). However, to make up for that, my LC's monitor is about the same age as the LC itself--likely because so many LCs were sold with the 12" monitor, they had to keep up demand.

Interestingly, I have another LC monitor which was manufactured in the exact same batch as the one I bought new!!