thumb|right|300px|Front view of a Macintosh LC II with Macintosh 12" RGB display, keyboard, and mouse
The Macintosh LC is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1990 to 1997.
Introduced alongside the Macintosh IIsi and Macintosh Classic as part of a new wave of lower-priced Macintosh computers, the LC offered about three quarters of the overall performance of the Macintosh II for half the price. Part of Apple's goal was to produce a machine that could be sold to school boards for the same price as an Apple II<small>GS</small>,
. Not long after the Apple IIe Card was introduced for the LC, Apple officially announced the retirement of the IIGS, as the company wanted to focus its sales and marketing efforts on the LC.
The original Macintosh LC was introduced in October 1990, with updates in the form of the LC II and LC III in 1992 and early 1993. These early models all shared the same pizza box form factor, and were joined by the Macintosh LC 500 series of all-in-one desktop machines in mid-1993. A total of twelve different LC models were produced by the company, the last of which, the Power Macintosh 5300 LC, was on sale until early 1997.
Overview
thumb|right|The LC family (LC, II, III, 475, Quadra 605) front face
After Apple co-founder Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, product development was handed to Jean-Louis Gassée, formerly manager of Apple France. Gassée consistently pushed the Apple product line in two directions, towards more "openness" in terms of expandability and interoperability, and towards higher price. Gassée long argued that Apple should not market their computers towards the low end of the market, where profits were thin, but instead concentrate on the high end and higher profit margins. He illustrated the concept using a graph showing the price/performance ratio of computers with low-power, low-cost machines in the lower left and high-power high-cost machines in the upper right. The "high-right" goal became a mantra among the upper management, who said "fifty-five or die", referring to Gassée's goal of a 55 percent profit margin.
This policy led to a series of ever more expensive computers. This was in spite of strenuous objections within the company, and when a group at Claris started a low-end Mac project called "Drama", Gassée actively killed it. Elsewhere at the company, two engineers, H.L. Cheung and Paul Baker, had been working in secret on a pet project, a color Macintosh prototype they called "Spin". The idea was to produce a low-cost system in the vein of the Apple II, a product that Cheung had previously worked on at Apple as the head of design. The machine would, in effect, be a significantly smaller Macintosh II with built-in video, no NuBus expansion, and a matching RGB monitor similar to the one introduced with the Apple IIGS the year prior. The project changed direction during development, with executives dictating that the machine should have video capabilities and processing power similar to the Macintosh IIci, which was also under development at the time. In early 1989, the prototype was shown to Apple executives, who liked the project but felt it was not different enough from existing models to justify further effort, and the project was shut down.
Around the same time, Apple CEO John Sculley was facing public scrutiny for declining sales that was blamed in large part on the company's lack of an inexpensive Macintosh computer. Amidst promises to the press and investors that a new low-cost Macintosh was on the way, he revived the Spin project with the goal of creating the lowest-priced Macintosh that was possible. Gassée pleaded with the team to keep color as a feature of the project, and from then on the product was known internally by a new code name, "Elsie", a homonym for the "LC" (i.e. low-cost color) name the computer would later be sold as. Elsie prototypes at this point resembled an Apple IIc where the keyboard was integrated into the unit, and it had a single 800 KB floppy drive with no hard drive. The team ended up with a problem — the machine was cheap, but it wasn't a good computer, especially because the 68000 CPU was not powerful enough to display color graphics with acceptable performance.