Cory's Blog

If there are solid figures for it online, I can't find them, but it was recently suggested that the Mac IIsi probably saw relatively poor sales figures, all things considered. It's an interesting thought because for people who bought and used it when it was new, the IIsi wasn't really a "bad" computer. According to reviews from the time, it's a fair clip faster than the original Macintosh LC. It's at least four times faster than the Macintosh Classic, but it's also for a very different crowd and was a lot more expensive. Unfortunately, vintage Mac enthusiasts tend to not like it purely because it isn't the IIci.

Rather than spend like twelve paragraphs, let's just present this information in a table:

Monitors for these systems cost more, and for the IIfx in particular, you needed to buy a graphics card. The 13-inch (640x480) RGB monitor was $999 and the 12-inch (512x384) RGB monitor was $599. A standard keyboard was $129 and an extended Keyboard was $229.

For reference, the Macintosh Classic is an all-in-one system with expandable RAM and an upgradeable hard disk, but no other expansion. The LC is a flat system with a single PDS expansion slot in it. The IIsi was a flat machine with a single PDS slot (of a different type) that could accommodate an adapter to install an FPU and a NuBus slot. The IIci was a bigger box and could hold three NuBus cards, and a special cache card, and the Mac IIfx was a "big box" system with six slots.

The context for the comments about the hardship of the Mac IIsi were based on just the information about the LC, the IIsi, and IIci. The suggestion is that the position between the LC and IIci in terms of expansion and performance wasn't going to be very interesting. However, even within most of the families, there are gradients. (I could have sworn there's a 2/0 or a dual floppy configuration of the LC, but I couldn't find it online.)

Given Apple's entire product line is a pretty smooth gradient (I bet there's a 4/160 or 8/40 configuration of the IIci hidden somewhere) I don't actually think that it's such a big problem. I suspect the rationale at the time was that there were a variety of different types of needs and budgets.

The IIsi and IIci are a pretty good comparison for what people want for in the Mythical Midrange Mac Minitower. Such a system as most people specify it would basically be a Dell XPS 8700 or Precision T1700. It would be the Apple branded gamer or prosumer system, if such a thing were being built today. The argument is that the IIci and IIsi were expandable prosumer '030 systems in an era where the LC and Classic were the mini and iMac and the IIfx was the Mac Pro, they were a system that let you have some but not all of what the IIfx offered.

I think the important distinction between systems today and in the '90s is that in the '90s, you typically needed expansion cards for certain tasks. Another thing that was either lost on Apple at the time, or simply "not done" is that it was probably possible to build a big-box Mac II with newer ROMs and a slower CPU, or a small-box Mac II with a faster CPU. One of the reasons for this, I can only presume, is that Apple plays the segmentation game much harder then than they do today. Today, they build physically different computers with different levels of power, but they don't have specific "home" or "education" computers such as the LC and Classic.

A better example of a time when Apple had separate "home" computers is probably later on in the 1990s when they had internally competing products such as the Power Macintosh 4400, which was a "Home Office" computer, the Power Macintosh 6500, which was a home computer, and the Power Macintosh 9600, which was Apple's Photoshop box of the time. This doesn't even count the 7300 or the 8600, which were also available.

Today, people think about the iMac and Mac mini as home computers, and the Mac Pro as a professional computer, but the names mean almost nothing at this point. For example, whereas in 1997 you would have purchased a 7300 as a corporate Excel-Box, you don't need to purchase a Mac Pro for that task today, the iMac and Mac mini can do it just as well. Apple makes no real attempt to differentiate the systems today based on "role" rather than just by how much (or the particular type, in the case of the Mac Pro) computing horsepower is available.

Nevertheless, people still want the Mythical Midrange Mac Minitower (MMMM). I question how well it would do. I can see why, and that class of hardware is where I'm shopping anyway, but I'm also at the point where I'd rather use Windows or Linux anyway.

Today, there's not much other potential in terms of models that provide a different amount of horsepower. Apple has done a very good job of using just three physical form factors (compare to five in 1990) to provide the gamut of Mac performance. The question is what value is added by adding another system with the same amount of computing horsepower, but a different amount of expansion, which is what many of the MMMM enthusiasts have been suggesting for a few years.

The other problem with the MMMM is that the true need for internalized expansion has decreased significantly over the years. With Thunderbolt 3 (a new mode of USB 3.1 Type C) you can now officially use external GPUs, which is one of the thing that "wears out" most quickly on a laptop or all-in-one computer. In addition, Thunderbolt 3 is much faster than the previous versions, at 40 gigabits per second.

Presently, it's known that only the most demanding of games (at the highest settings) will really perform worse on any given GPU via Thunderbolt rather than directly using a PCI Express slot. The official way to get a Mac with a high end desktop CPU and slots and a few extra disk bays will be to get an iMac and add such an expansion chassis to it. Apple may even make them on their own – it would have near universal appeal to Mac owners and would allow Apple to ditch the discrete GPUs on the 15-inch MacBook pros.

The oft-cited counter to this is that it looks messy to have an outboard peripheral (even if it's just one and a GPU, some slots, and some disk bays are all put into one relatively trim box you can dump on the floor) but that line of reasoning has never made much sense to me, because (especially in the "one big box" situation) it'll be cleaner and better looking than a PC-style setup, and I suspect this is one of the reasons we are seeing more of the PC OEMs move toward having all-in-one systems in their product lineup.

I think one of the other big points is that Apple thinks that internally expandable user computers are the next floppy drive, CD/DVD drive and Ethernet – simply not necessary for most people. Whether or not they have a point for the computing industry as a whole, I agree that the majority of Mac users really are buying the things because they want a computing appliance and as such, don't really care about being able to add more ports or new types of ports.

Of course, this type of thing is difficult to get a really accurate idea of, because the people who outwardly want the MMMM (and similarly, dislike the new Mac Pro) are very loud about it, but I imagine that there is really not that large a majority of them. Everybody else is either just dealing with external devices (something they were probably already doing) or may already have had a "wires and devices" problem even with other Macs.

Unfortunately, it may be that the only way to know for sure is to actually try to build the thing (which would involve a lot of decision-making on Apple's part.) As in 1990, different people have different ideas of what they want out of such a machine. Some want it to have almost everything the old Mac Pro had, but a single CPU, cheaper RAM, and a gamer GPU. Some people want something with just one or two slots and room for one or two hard disks, and some people really just want a Mac mini with a beefier CPU and GPU built in.

A change in the situation between 1990-2000 and today is that the iMac is a very important, central part of Apple's desktop product stack today. It's an all-in-one computer, and it's pricing and horsepower properties (mostly) aren't replicated by the Mac mini or Pro. The biggest problem with the iMac is that a fair amount of its cost is the beautiful 21.5 or 27-inch display, one of the most accurate in the industry, which you can't re-use when you get your new computer, the way you would on a modular system.

From that perspective, I can see the desire for a fourth Apple desktop which would truly be a headless version of the iMac. This gives somebody like me (who has a display I like connected to my current Mac mini) a really compelling upgrade from the Mac mini without going all the way to the Mac Pro. This "Mac" would still be highly integrated, but it would be a little more serviceable and upgradeable, possibly with a hatch the user can open to replace storage and RAM, and maintain the cooling system. I doubt it would gain any real storage advantages (such as being able to use two 3.5-inch disks) or any slots though. Because of how Thunderbolt and USB Type-C work, Apple necessarily needs to be the one to design, possibly build, and integrate the GPU.

With this in mind, I'm becoming convinced that the "Mac" is actually a pretty good idea. People like me would be able to make modest upgrades to it and do maintenance to it, and even the people in the typical Mac appliance market would have better control over things like displays. The system would unofficially have some more maintainability than the iMac, and (due to better cooling hardware) may have some additional configuration flexibility such as the ability to use much beefier graphics hardware like the desktop versions of Radeon R9 series chips.

Apple won't do it, and even if they did, the MMMM crowd would continue to ask for that machine, citing needs of slots and bays, but it would be an intriguing way to fill out their product line. Part of the intrigue for me would be the how Apple does or doesn't choose to build other products around it. For example, an updated Thunderbolt display (or two?) would be a great way to showcase the product, and fill some unmet needs for mini and Pro buyers.

At the end of the day, the Macintosh is enough of an appliance that I doubt they'll do it. To a certain extent, I'm not completely convinced it's even a good idea, if only because it's still tantalizingly close to what the MMMM crowd wants, without actually getting there. What the "Mac" would really be proves that Apple's complete control over the platform is both a blessing and a curse for people who would like more control over their hardware, but still want to use Mac OS X (which still gives you a remarkable amount of control over the software.)

What Apple sells in the Mac is a computer that "just works" and part of getting to that point is that there has always been less choice in hardware. In order to provide the best experience possible to the majority of their customers, there's almost certainly never going to be an MMMM. And so, a Macintosh product lineup with more than one option in the middle, representing different mixes of performance, expandability, and budget is simply a thing of the past. I question whether it's really a loss though.