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Upon arrival, the pewter-colored, LCD-screened TAM knocked the Macintosh TV off my display shelf-and it ended up in a corner gathering dust until I parted with it some time later.Ĭould Apple have made the Macintosh TV a better machine at the time? It's hard to see how without also making the computer completely unaffordable in the process. The novelty of having a 14" TV shaped like a computer in my office wore off quickly, and it wasn't much longer before I snapped up a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM) on eBay.
#Is there a tv tuner for mac mac os
I flipped back to the desktop environment and poked around for a while, but given that my main machine was a PowerMacintosh G4 running an early version of Mac OS X, not much was compelling there. Advertisementįurther Reading 20 years ago, Apple killed the Twentieth Anniversary MacYep.
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I did a fresh install of System 7.1 from the restore CD-ROM included with the machine, attached an antenna, and turned on the TV. It arrived in a nondescript brown box inside were all of the original parts and accessories, as advertised in the auction ( A++++++ SELLER! WOULD BUY AGAIN!!!). The office on the second floor of my Chicago bungalow had a cable jack but no TV set, so when I saw a couple of complete Macintosh TVs on eBay, I decided to add one to my collection. In the early 2000s, I thought it would be fun to collect and display vintage Macs in my home office, especially groundbreaking models and those with odd form factors. Still, I did eventually purchase a Macintosh TV. LowEnd Mac wasn't impressed with it, either the Mac TV sits in fourth place on its list of the Ten Worst Macs Ever. In 2009, Macworld gave it the number two slot on its list of the six worst Macintoshes of all time. While not a flop of Lisa-sized proportions, the Macintosh TV arguably remains one of Apple's biggest failures. (That's right, I willingly bought a machine with a 9.8" passive-matrix grayscale display.) The sales figures for the black Mac show that I was far from the only one to go through a similar thought process indeed, Apple shipped only 10,000 of the all-in-ones before officially discontinuing the Macintosh TV in February 1995. The temptation to buy a Macintosh TV quickly passed, and I ended up spending my hard earned cash on a PowerBook 165 instead. (The Performa 520 and LC 520 supported up to 36MB.) Advertisement And even if you had loads of money to spend on RAM, you could only stuff 8MB into the black box. Despite being clocked faster than its 25MHz Performa 520 and LC 520 siblings, the Macintosh TV's bus speed of 16MHz made it a performance laggard. The Macintosh TV was also slower than its Mac contemporaries. And while TV was viewable in 16-bit color, your desktop computing experience was an 8-bit one. Instead, users were limited to saving individual frames of video as PICT files. Unlike today, where you can watch TV in a window while browsing the Web, writing e-mail, or idly checking Facebook, the System 7.1 desktop disappeared when you switched over to the TV. The Macintosh TV made computing and watching television an either/or proposition. There was also the matter of the TV tuner. The Macintosh TV even came with a remote control, something my decade-old dorm room holdover lacked. But that price! I had a 13" TV in my bedroom, so why not kill two birds with one stone? I could replace the TV and get a computer all at the same time.
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At the time, I was using my roommate's Mac Classic II and thinking about getting my own machine. I remember seeing a Macintosh TV in late 1993 and feeling a quick pang of desire. That extra $599 bought you an internal CD-ROM drive, four additional inches of CRT space, a coat of black paint, and the killer app: a TV tuner. For some context, a comparable all-in-one Mac with a color monitor was the $1,500 Color Classic II released earlier that year. In addition to the aforementioned 32MHz CPU, the Macintosh TV shipped with 5MB of RAM (expandable to 8MB), a 160MB hard drive, and built-in 14" Sony Trinitron CRT running at 640×480. Twenty years ago today, the Macintosh TV was thrust upon an unsuspecting public. It also marked Apple's first tentative foray into the living room.
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It was an all-in-one computer running System 7.1, and it shared a case in common with the Macintosh Performa 500 and LC 500 series. Powered by a 32MHz Motorola 68030, the Macintosh TV was painted black and paired with a black keyboard and mouse. Vectronic's Apple WorldIn a world of beige-colored boxes, this one stood out.