Where did that thing come from?
My guess would be a focus group...Apple had a weak period in design in the late 80's when I worked there (in tech support) when things were designed with too much emphasis on focus groups and test markets and they made the "classic" and the "LC" which were nice but fundamentally unoriginal, uninspiring and untimately failed in the market.
These machines were supposed to kill the PC (that's what they told us at the company pep rallys) but ultimately they were the undoing of John Scully and set apple back years.
Good design takes risks and when it works has big payoffs ala the ipod. No guts no glory.
What's really going to be worth a fortune someday...
as a collectible, if it isn't already, is an Apple Lisa. Interesting Corbusier-esque design vocabulary. Inverted, cantilevered massing. Brutalism on your desk top. If the pricing and function had been better fits with needs, and the platform had been open, computers might still be massed like this. Imagine the whole front of the box as a plasma screen.
On the other hand, there was The Next Cube--a triumph of high concept over both aesthetics AND function.
Like all geniuses, Steve has had his hits and his misses.
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