Macintosh TV
Bringing new meaning to the term “all-in-one,” the Macintosh TV was part desktop, part television. The idea is that you could save space, and ideally money, by purchasing a desktop that could double as your television. At the heart of this machine was a Macintosh LC 520 powered by a 32 MHz Motorola 68030 processor, a measly 5MB of memory (upgradable to 8MB), and a 160MB hard drive. The kicker, besides its wonderful and now exceedingly rare all-black chassis? A built-in 14-inch Sony Trinitron CRT TV running at a 640 x 480-pixel resolution.
Today, you can watch TV in a separate app or browser window while you continue to work on your computer. Back then, you weren’t so lucky. The Macintosh TV was either-or: pressing the “TV/Mac” button on a credit card-sized Sony remote that shipped with the PC changed your inputs from Mac to TV. So you could be playing Pacman on the TV and then get right back to work on your Mac with the press of a button. That was pretty sweet back then, especially if you were a college student huddled in a small dorm. It was also pricey, selling at $2,099, or about $500 more than the comparable Color Classic II.
In the end, the Macintosh TV was slower and more expensive than other options on the market, and it lacked core features. Apple ended up shipping only 10,000 units before discontinuing the Macintosh TV four months after its release.
