Second Class Macs & Road Apples

Macintosh TV

three

Dan Knight - 1998.04.11

Road Apples are Apple's most compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they're not completely bad - simply designs that couldn't meet their potential. (On our rating scale, the more brown apples, the worse the hardware.)

Mac TV The first desktop Mac finished in an attractive black color, the Mac TV was pretty much a crippled LC 520 with a TV tuner instead of an expansion slot.

Crippled because where the LC 520 could be expanded to 36 MB, Mac TV could only go from the stock 5 MB to 8 MB.

It did have 16-bit video for TV images, but the Mac OS could only use 8-bit video. On the plus side, you could capture a single frame of a 16-bit TV image to disk.

Although it uses a 32 MHz 68030 CPU, Mac TV benchmarks slower than the 25 MHz LC III and LC 520 because Apple ran the CPU on a 16 MHz bus.

If you're very tight for space, don't need a lot of memory, and aren't interested in a lot of speed, the beautiful black Mac TV is a really cool find, although it's not much of a Mac.

But with no expansion slot, an 8 MB RAM ceiling, and poor performance, the gorgeous-but-crippled Mac TV earns the title of Road Apple - the oldest Mac with this designation.

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