iFixit:
Join us as we live the time-traveler’s dream—the deep, lucid, Orwellian vision of hope, fear, and nostalgia that is 1984. Just in time for its 30th anniversary, we laid hands on an ’84 original: the Macintosh 128K. And, you guessed it—we’re tearing it down like it’s the Berlin Wall.
I guarantee iFixit will bitch about the fact it’s not upgradeable.
7/10, yellow for “limited upgradeability”.
“The RAM is soldered to the logic board and can’t be replaced, and
there’s no slot/port to add an internal drive. However, you can expand
storage via an optional external floppy drive.”
One does wonder if they realized how big* an “internal drive” was in 1984, or that Apple didn’t even sell a hard disk until 1984, or what the external floppy cost. A slot for a thing you can just plug into a dedicated port? Why? WHY?
I think it counts as at least light bitching to complain that there wasn’t a drive slot, since Apple didn’t add one until the SE in 1987, for the same reason it’d be bitching to complain about lack of color.
(* People forget that modern 3.5″ drives are half height or even thinner, and also how much power one ate in 1985. The Apple 20MB Drive unit’s power supply is bigger than the disk, which is itself not tiny.
The amazing thing is that third parties somehow managed to shove a hard drive inside 128k or Fat Mac case and have it work.)
Reminds me a tiny bit about how Consumer Reports took points off their original iMac review for its lack of a slot for a network card.
Hey Shawn, my neighbor Fred (of Fred’s Retort) upgraded my 128K to 512K!!! I was in hog heaven. I knew I would never need any more RAM!