Today, we explore the world of the Performa 520, which was a rebadged version of the LC 520. The two machines were put on sale at the same time, in June 1993. The Performa version was not sold in the United States and came with more bloatware than the LC. (The LC 520 was initially sold only to schools.)
For the sake of this article, I will refer to this pair of machines as the “520,” and unless specifically called out, everything in this column will apply to both machines.
The Design
By the early 1990s, the design of the original Macintosh had gotten pretty tired. Apple had evolved it over time, adding things like internal hard drives, expansion slots, and a slightly larger color screen, but the all-in-one Mac was begging for an upgrade for the mid-90s. Users wanted features like larger screens and CD-ROM drives, and the compact Mac form factor just wasn’t up to the task.
A design project was kicked off to design a new all-in-one for the 90s and was given the nickname “Mondo,” according to Paul Kunkel’s excellent book AppleDesign.
Things did not go well.
According to Kunkel, Apple was going to abandon the all-in-one form factor after the Color Classic shipped, but the idea of making a larger all-in-one wouldn’t die, and in fact, was central to a project with an outside firm named Lunar Design, that was working on concepts for a 10th Anniversary Mac.
While that never happened, the group came up with what would become the 520. Kunkel writes:
To reduce the bulk, lunar allowed the plastic to hug the internal components as tightly as possible — a lower section containing the motherboard and speakers, a middle section containing the floppy/hard drive/CD-ROM, and a top tier containing the monitor — which gave the design a “wedding cake” look and viewed from the back.
On the front, the sensation was reversed, with the largest mass (the screen) at the top and the smallest (the foot) at the bottom. The foot elevated the front of the computer and angled the display back six degrees, continuing the gesture used on the Color Classic and Mac LS, with speakers set behind a radiating perf pattern and rocker buttons controlling column and display contrast.
The design was so strange that Larry Barbera (the Apple manager overseeing the project) could only scratch his head. Since no one at IDg (Apple’s Industrial Design Group) liked the design, Barbera had no choice but to put it on the shelf.
Some months later, John Sculley would ask the team to work on a larger all-in-one, so the design was taken off the shelf, dusted off, and put into production. From what I have read, this led to real tension between Apple’s product and design groups.
Apple’s head of Industrial Design at the time was Bob Brunner, who said, “The conflict between designers and engineers exists because we work side-by-side but think in very different ways. Engineers have to worry about making a product that’s manufactured at a low cost. Designers worry about the look and feel, which can make the engineers’ lives difficult, but the schedule is tight. For this reason, whenever the engineers can take control of design, they do, which makes us miserable.”
This computer is far from the most graceful thing Apple has produced. These photos are of my Performa 580CD, but the form factor is the same as the 520.
Don’t look directly at it for too long, and if you pick one up, be careful, as it weighs 40 pounds.
Like many Macs of the time, the logic board and hard drive could be accessed with just a couple of screws:
While awkward, this design met the goals that Apple had in mind, including the inclusion of a larger display and a CD-ROM drive. The latter required the use of a caddy.
This case would house additional LC/Performa models, including the 550, the 560 Money Edition, the 575, and the 580. It was also used — in black — for the Macintosh TV.
The Specs
While the outside was all new, the inside of the LC/Performa 520 was exactly the same as the LC III, with an additional 1 MB of standard RAM, meaning the 520 shipped with a whopping 5 MB of memory.
The Plan
Once the 520 had graduated from a forgotten design project to be an actual product, it earned a new code name: “Hook.”
Sculley and the company saw this machine as another way to migrate Apple’s user base away from the Apple II and toward the Macintosh. Unlike consumer offerings, the LC 520 would do this in the education market, as Robert Hess wrote for MacWEEK at the time:
Christmas will arrive in July this year for children in the United States when Apple introduces the newest member of its LC line of Macs, the LC 520.
The low-cost LC line, which has been most successful in the primary education market, has only lacked for a CD-ROM-equipped model. That’s the niche Apple intends to fill with the LC 520, which will be available only in the K-12 market, sources said.
Reflecting Apple’s desire to make CD-ROM a standard feature of the Mac line, the LC 520 will ship with a Sony dual-speed CD-ROM player. Built into the Mac’s display are stereo speakers that can enhance both CD-ROM and the Mac’s sound output.
I have memories of using some flavor of the 500 Series in elementary school, playing Odell Down Under and typing in an ancient version of ClarisWorks.
With the LC 520 chipping away at the Apple II’s footprint in schools and the Performa 520 being on sale outside the United States, this new design didn’t make a big impact on the consumer market in the US at first, with Apple’s other Performa models continuing to be sold through big-box retailers.
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