Apple recently sounded Taps for the venerable Mac Plus by removing some related items from its price lists. Although the Mac Plus itself has been off the price list since last fall, when it was replaced by the Mac Classic, Apple has continued to offer the upgrades required to turn a 128K or 512K Macintosh into a Plus. As of the 15 September price lists, though, these products, the Macintosh Plus Disk Drive Kit and the Macintosh Plus Logic Board Kit, along with the Macintosh Plus Keyboard, are history.

According to Apple, the upgrade products are being discontinued because of the Macintosh Classic, which offers a better value than upgrading old equipment. In fact, most dealers have been saying the same thing for a long time, though some customers have preferred to stick with their trusty original Macs, and have upgraded anyway. The current backlog of orders will be filled, but no new orders will be taken for these products.

I remember when these upgrade products first became available, and I remember having the upgrades performed on my Mac! There's no question that the upgrades were useful at the time, but I think their usefulness evaporated quite a while ago. It's about time that Apple retired them.

At the same time, Apple announced that it is discontinuing its Macintosh II Internal 800K floppy drive, due to the availability of the Macintosh II SuperDrive upgrade. In addition, Apple is removing its blank diskettes from the price list. As they put it, "Floppy media is being discontinued because there are many vendors offering floppy media to meet customers demands." Did anyone ever really buy Apple-label diskettes anyway?

Information from:
Mark H. Anbinder -- mha@memory.ithaca.ny.us