Macintosh 512Ke

Apple introduced the 512Ke on April 14, 1986, the same day as the Macintosh Plus, and its job was to sit underneath it. Take a 512K, give it the Plus's 800K double-sided floppy drive and the Plus's 128K ROM, sell it cheaper. That was the whole product. The e meant enhanced. The new ROM brought double-sided floppy support and the Hierarchical File System across from the Plus, which is what let the machine run newer System releases without choking. Storage doubled. Nothing else moved. Outside it was a 512K, same beige case and 9-inch screen, and inside the processor was still a 7.83MHz 68000, so nobody bought one for speed. What the 512Ke bought you was compatibility with the software actually shipping in 1986, at a price below the Plus and without the SCSI port or the other Plus refinements. Schools took it. So did students and anyone for whom the gap between the two prices was the deciding factor, which was rather the point. Reviewers largely ignored it, having just been handed the Plus to write about. Apple kept selling it into 1987 as the cheapest way into a Macintosh. It is the first clear case of Apple building a cheaper model by taking things out of an existing one rather than retiring the old machine, which became standard practice.