Macintosh SE

The Macintosh SE arrived March 2, 1987, the same morning as the Macintosh II, and got rather less attention than it deserved. SE stood for System Expansion. It was the first compact Mac with an internal expansion slot and the first with an internal hard drive option, which between them answered years of complaints about a sealed case Apple had deliberately made hard to open. One slot is not six. The Mac II had six NuBus slots against the SE's single connector, but third parties filled that one with accelerators and networking cards and kept the machines useful for years longer than they would otherwise have been. The processor did not change. Still a 7.83MHz 68000, still no faster than a Plus. What changed was everything around it: a fan, a quieter and better-built chassis, room for a 20 or 40 megabyte SCSI drive inside the case instead of cabled to the back. The Apple Desktop Bus turned up here too, and ADB keyboards and mice stayed standard across the line for the next ten years. Reviewers liked the build and the practicality and kept pointing at the other machine launched that morning. Next to a color-capable Mac II the SE's 9-inch monochrome screen looked like 1984, which it was. Schools and small offices bought it in quantity. Two years later the SE/30 put a 68030 in the same case and became one of the best-liked Macs Apple ever made.