Macintosh Color Classic
personal computer by Apple
The Macintosh Color Classic (sold as the Macintosh Colour Classic in PAL regions) is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from February 1993 to May 1995 (up to January 1998 in PAL markets). It has an all-in-one design, with a small, integrated 10″ Sony Trinitron display at 512 × 384 pixel resolution. The display is capable of supporting up to thousands of colors with a video memory upgrade.
A slightly updated model, the Color Classic II, featuring the Macintosh LC 550 logic board with a 33 MHz 68030 processor, with the full 32-bit data bus, was released in Japan, Canada and some international markets in 1993, sometimes as the Performa 275.
The Color Classic is the final model of the original "compact" family of Macintosh computers, and was replaced by the larger-display Macintosh LC 500 series and Power Macintosh 5200 LC.
Hardware
The Color Classic has a Motorola 68030 CPU running at 16 MHz and has a logic board similar to the Macintosh LC II, with only a cost-reduced 16-bit data bus.
Like the Macintosh SE and SE/30 before it, the Color Classic has a single expansion slot: an LC-type Processor Direct Slot (PDS), incompatible with the SE slots. This was primarily intended for the Apple IIe Card (the primary reason for the Color Classic's switchable 560 × 384 display, essentially quadruple the IIe's 280 × 192 High-Resolution graphics), which was offered with education models of the LCs. The card allowed the LCs to emulate an Apple IIe. The combination of the low-cost color Macintosh and Apple IIe compatibility was intended to encourage the education market's transition from Apple II models to Macintoshes.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q965936. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993, 1995 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Macintosh Color Classic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.