Macintosh LC

For the product family, see Macintosh LC family.

Macintosh LC

A Macintosh LC with accessories
Also known as	"Elsie"
Developer	Apple Computer, Inc.
Product family	Macintosh LC
Released	October 15, 1990 (1990-10-15)
Introductory price	US$2,499 (equivalent to $6,158 in 2025)
Discontinued	March 23, 1992 (1992-03-23)
Operating system	System 6.0.6–7.5.5
CPU	Motorola 68020 @ 15.66 MHz
Memory	2 MB, expandable to 10 MB (100ns 30-pin SIMM)
Dimensions	2.9 × 12.2 × 15.3 in (74 × 310 × 389 mm)
Weight	8.8 lb (4.0 kg)
Successor	Macintosh LC II

The Macintosh LC is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from October 1990 to March 1992. The "LC" in the name stood for Low Cost—or Low-cost Color, a reference to it being the first affordable color Macintosh computer for the entry level consumer.

Overview

The first in the Macintosh LC family, the LC was introduced alongside the Macintosh Classic (the lowest-cost Mac) and the Macintosh IIsi (a new entry-level machine for the Macintosh II series), and offered for half the price of the Macintosh II but significantly lesser in performance overall. The creation of the LC was prompted by Apple's desire to produce a product that could be sold to school boards for the same price as an Apple IIGS. It was designed for inexpensive manufacturing, with five major components that robots could assemble. The computer had a $2,400 list price; it and the new $600 12-inch color display were $3,500 less expensive than the Macintosh II. Not long after the Apple IIe Card was introduced for the LC, Apple quietly removed the IIGS from its price list, forcibly retiring it, as the company wanted to focus its sales and marketing efforts on the LC.

The original Macintosh LC was introduced in October 1990, with initial shipments to dealers following in December and January. It was discontinued in March 1992 and replaced by Macintosh LC II, which was largely the same but was built around a Motorola 68030 processor.

Both the LC and LC II can be upgraded with the LC III's logic board.

Hardware

Internal view of a Macintosh LC with two floppy drives

The LC uses a "pizza box" case with a Processor Direct Slot (PDS) but no NuBus slots. It has a 16 MHz Motorola 68020 microprocessor, but no floating-point coprocessor (although one could be added via the PDS). The LC has a 16-bit data bus, which is a major performance bottleneck as the 68020 is a 32-bit CPU. The LC's memory management chipset places a limit of 10 MB RAM no matter how much was installed.

The LC shipped with 256 kB of video RAM (VRAM), supporting a display resolution of 512 × 384 pixels (px) at 8-bit color or 640 × 480 px at 4 bits. The VRAM can be upgraded to 512 kB, supporting a display resolution of 512 × 384 px at 16 bits or 640 × 480 px at 8 bits.

The LC was commonly sold with Apple's 12-inch color monitor, which had a fixed resolution of 512 × 384 and matched the width of the computer's case, and was priced at US$599 (equivalent to $1,476 in 2025). Apple also offered a 13-inch Trinitron display with a resolution of 640 × 480, although at a list price of US$999 (equivalent to $2,462 in 2025) it cost about half as much as the LC itself.

Before the LC, the lowest display resolution supported by a color Macintosh was 640 × 480. As a result, some software written for the Macintosh II family expected that resolution and would not run correctly at 512 × 384. Developers later added support for the lower resolution to ensure compatibility with the LC and the Color Classic, which used the same display resolution.

Overall performance of the machine was limited by its slower data bus, causing it to perform worse than the 16 MHz 68020-based Macintosh II from 1987, which used the same processor but had a faster system architecture. Unlike the Macintosh II, the LC did not include a socket for the 68851 MMU, preventing it from supporting the virtual memory features introduced in System 7.

The standard configuration included a floppy drive and either a 40 MB or 80 MB hard drive. A version marketed for the education sector included an Apple IIe Card in the Processor Direct Slot (PDS), two floppy drives, and no hard drive. The LC was the final Macintosh model to support two internal floppy drives. Like other Macintosh models of the period, it supported networking through the serial port using LocalTalk. Ethernet was available as an option through the PDS slot. Multi-function expansion cards were also available that combined Ethernet with an MMU or FPU socket.

Apple IIe Card

Main article: Apple IIe Card

The Apple IIe Card, available for the PDS slot, was bundled with some education models of the LC. The card allowed the computer to emulate an Apple IIe. It provided compatibility with existing Apple II software while allowing schools to use Macintosh hardware. LCs equipped with the card could switch to a 560 × 384 display mode for improved compatibility with the Apple IIe's 280 × 192 high-resolution graphics and 560 × 192 double high-resolution graphics modes.

Reception

Computer Gaming World in 1990 criticized the LC as too expensive, stating that consumers would prefer a $2,000 IBM PS/1 with VGA graphics to a $3,000 LC with color monitor. Although the Classic was more popular at first, by May 1992 the LC (560,000 sold) was outselling the Classic (1.2 million). More than half of LCs were used in homes and schools; Apple claimed that it helped the company regain educational market share lost to inexpensive PC clones, with the IIe Card used in about half of schools' LCs.

Timeline

Timeline of Macintosh Centris, LC, Performa, and Quadra models, colored by CPU type
See also: List of Mac models

External links

• Apple Macintosh LC (Original) Specs at everymac.com.
• Mac LC at lowendmac.com.