Macintosh LC 500 Series - LC 580

LC 580

The Macintosh LC 580 was sold in 1995 and 1996. Like their immediate predecessor, the LC 575, it used the Motorola 68LC040 processor at 33 MHz. However, instead of being based on the LC 475/Quadra 605 like the 575 series was, the 580s are based on the Performa 630 series. This meant a few changes, most of them leading to lower prices, but also lower performance: Most notably, the hard drives of the 580 were IDE drives instead of SCSI drives. Also, the video RAM was no longer mounted on a SIMM, but used 1 MB of the 4 MB of main RAM soldered to the motherboard. Lastly, the Trinitron display of the 575 was replaced with a cheaper shadow mask screen. One benefit of this change was the ability to accommodate the same video capture and TV tuner cards designed for the Performa 630. This allowed LC 580 users to watch and record video, essentially performing the function of a television as well as a computer.

As with the LC 575, the CPU clock is sometimes wrongly given as 66 MHz. The LC 580 was the last all-in-one type model to include a Motorola 68000 series processor, as it was phased out in favor of the Power Macintosh 5200 LC which featured a PowerPC processor. As with the 575, Apple also offered an upgrade path in the form of a PowerPC Macintosh Processor Upgrade. The 580 can also be upgraded with the following logicboards: 5200, 6200, 5260, 5300, 6300, 5400, 6400, 5500 & 6500.