April 3, 1995: Apple introduces the Macintosh LC 580, an affordable computer offering good multimedia capabilities on a budget.
It quickly proves popular in the educational market. If you used a Mac in the classroom in the mid-1990s, there’s a good chance it was this very model!
Macintosh LC 580: The Mac that classrooms deserved
If you worry that Apple’s product lines seem more confused now than when Steve Jobs ran the company, rest assured that today’s offerings are nothing compared to the Mac lineup in the mid-1990s.
Without even delving into laptops or the netherworld of third-party Macintosh clones, Apple’s ’90s-era Mac lineup proved hopelessly complicated. Desktop sub-product lines such as the Centris, Quadra, Classic II and Color Classic models competed for mindshare. The LC 500 series sat somewhere in the middle — at the top of the low-end Mac models.
The Macintosh LC 580 (which, confusingly, was sold in Canada, Asia and Australia as the Performa 580CD) was an affordable multimedia Mac. Priced at $1,199, it boasted a Motorola 68LC040 processor running at 33 MHz, a 14-inch color Trinitron display and a double-speed CD-ROM drive. It also came with a video input, en external video connector, speakers and a microphone.
Developed at Apple under the codename “Dragonkid,” it shipped with System 7.5 preinstalled.
The LC 580 did not reinvent the wheel by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it offered a higher-performance version of the one-step-down Macintosh LC 575. As with many Macs of the time, it was expandable — in this case from 4MB of soldered DRAM to 52MB with two 72-pin SIMMs.
There’s a good reason Apple did not tinker with its formula too much, however. In the 1990s, schools were one of the few places Macs did very well. Selling an affordable Macintosh that offered multimedia abilities far superior to Windows PCs proved a smart move for the company. The LC 580 delivered on that promise.
Do you remember the Macintosh LC 580? Leave your comments below.
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Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “Today in Apple history: Macintosh LC 580 is ready for school”
They were great to work on, with the removable logic board, and they had the PPC upgrade socket. My High School even had one without a CD drive.
I have one of these parked under a table somewhere. i bought it for my wife who wanted something simple – an all-in-one with a decent sized color screen. It was a capable machine. For comparison, before moving up to an 8100, I published a magazine on the original pizza box LC, which was less powerful than this.
The heir to this was the eMac.
This machine is significant because it is the starting point for the original Bondi iMac – the machine that saved Apple.