Macintosh TV

Overview

It's a black LC 550! It's a color TV! It's ... Macintosh TV!

This was perhaps the oddest Macintosh ever. It was the last with an '030 processor, the first with a built-in TV tuner, the first (and, so far, only) black desktop Mac, and the only Mac to ship with a remote control. The built-in 14" Trinitron monitor displayed 16-bit TV images, but only 8-bit computer graphics. Software allowed it to capture a single frame from the TV as a PICT file.

Alas, you can't watch TV and compute at the same time. It was an interesting experiment, marketed exclusively through consumer electronic channels. With an '040 CPU, the ability to capture TV as a QuickTime movie, and the option of watching TV in a small window while computing, this could have been a contender. Instead, it is a curious footnote in Apple's history.

Details

Cautions


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