Six of the rarest Macs
If youre a longtime fan of the Macintosh platform, chances are you are a bit of a collector and a historian. Aside from their being endearing machines that earned user loyalty, Macs retained their usefulness far longer than most PCs, encouraging people to hang on to them. Who among you doesnt have an old Mac in your closet?
It may be time to pay your closet a visit, because that machine gathering dust beside your old ski boots may represent one of the last surviving examples of a rare breed of Macintosh.
Many Macs are uncommon or hard to find today, but for the sake of brevity (and for fear of the dreaded TL;DR), Ive decided to examine six of the rarest among them.
For whatever reasonusually low production numbers or unpopularityfew of the following Macs have live on to the present day. If you own one of them, take it out of the closet and hang it like a taxidermied moose above your ski lodge mantle. (Assuming you have a mantle, of course.)
JLPGA PowerBook 170 (1992)
In 1992, Apple manufactured approximately 500 multicolored PowerBook 170 models to commemorate the 1992 JLPGA golf tournament in Japan. If you ever set your hands upon this colorful machine, you’ll have yourself quite a prize.
Apple must have had a field day picking the colors for this machine. It sports a mostly blue body with a white lid and base, red battery doors and contrast sliders, yellow hinge caps and trackball, and green elevating feet. Other than all that, it appears to be a relatively unassuming PowerBook 170.
Color Classic II (1993)
The Apple Computer of old loved computer sequels, and, accordingly, the Color Classic II served as the second act to February 1993s Color Classic. With a motherboard that about doubled the CPU speed and RAM capacity of its predecessor, collectors prize the Color Classic II for being what the original Color Classic should have been.
Of course, theres a catch: The Color Classic II never (officially) graced the shores of the United States. Limited to sales primarily in Japan and Canada, these rare beasts are difficult to find in Apples own homeland.
In that regrettable age when a single Mac model could have 15 different names (Im exaggerating only slightly), Apple also sold the Color Classic II as the Performa 275. If you find either one, enjoy it wisely, knowing that you hold in your hands the end of a long, proud line of 9-inch display-bearing compact Macs.
Macintosh TV (1993)
Nineteen years after its debut, Apples first experiment in TV-computer integration remains the rarest full-production Mac ever released. Apple manufactured a mere 10,000 units of the Macintosh TV before pulling the plug four months after its launch.
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