Macintosh IIci

The IIci went on sale September 20, 1989 and stayed Apple's fastest mainstream desktop for about two years, which in that industry at that moment was a very long time. A 68030 at 25MHz did most of the work. That was a real jump over the IIx and the original Mac II, not an architectural one you had to squint at. More usefully, the IIci was the first Macintosh with color video built onto the logic board, so a typical setup no longer burned a NuBus slot on a video card just to drive a monitor. The case shrank too. A low flat pizza box instead of a tower, three NuBus slots instead of six, and a shape that fitted on a desk with a monitor sitting on top of it. There was also a cache slot, and the cache cards that went in it were popular with anyone chasing the last available percent. Reviewers called it the best all-round Mac you could buy and meant it. Speed, built-in video, a sensible size and real expansion, at a price that looked reasonable next to what the Mac II and IIx had cost, which made it the default recommendation for publishers and professionals who did not need a IIfx. Built-in video became standard on Macs after this. Plenty of IIci units stayed in service for most of a decade running AppleShare servers and page layout software, and the machine still gets named as the best of the Mac II family.