What is this "gutted" business? It's a logicboard swap. Open the case, switch the logicboards, voila, it's a 128K again. What's to mourn? M0001 & M0001W are the same thing with different logicboards. Nothing's been gutted, just swapped. Maybe we're talking semantics here, but gutted is a little extreme for the difference between a M0001 and M0001E, which is what this is since the ROMs have been upgraded as well. Kallikak is right on with his assessment above!
I posted the same link you did to support my facts, but the URL is embedded in the sentence. And that article says that the Mac sold less than 20K units staring in November when marketing projected 75K (not Jobs). That had NOTHING to do with the record number of units they had sold to that point (and 20K a month is nothing to sneeze at). The Macintosh 128K sold VERY well. Just not as well in the 4th quarter '84 as everyone hoped. The fact 128Ks turn up on eBay at least 2 or 3 times a month on average, suggests they are not terribly rare. As for Steve Jobs getting "fired" ... where in the article does it say that? He was never "fired". In fact in the end, he resigned to start Next.
Boy this thread took a tangent.
And I wrote a number of term papers on it. How hobbled was it, what software? Disk swaps were a nightmare and still are. Thats why you had to have an external disk drive and with ANY Mac that didn't have a hard drive. I use my 128K with an external disk drive and never have a complaint. It's productive as I need it to be. I thanked God everyday when I was using it to write papers back then and never once cursed its deficiencies, well except occasionally when I had forgotten to save for a while and crashed, but that persisted right up through the SE/30s, so not just a 128K problem. I had other more powerful Macs available to me, but I never felt I needed them. As for software, I would argue a lot of the problems with the 128K was poorly written software. Doug Clapp's excellent "Complete Macintosh SourceBook" discusses it at length. Microsoft in fact was one of the biggest offenders not following Apple's guidelines. Take a look in MacTech, many of the reviews about Microsoft products complain about how they bucked Apple convention. The remaining problems were developers overreaching for the 128K's capabilities. It was such an amazing machine they wanted it to do more and released software that was overwritten for it. The same thing is true today. How many of you are running OSX on a G3? Talk about a Ferrari engine in a Volkswagen! But I have a little application called MusicWorks that was available almost from day one that allowed you to compose 4-part polyphonic songs in real music notation and play them back on the 128K. I never once complained about such an amazing piece of software back then and really have no complaints by today's standards, in part because it was probably so well written.
This doesn't even make any sense. To what are you referring? Steve did a lot of stuff during that
Any discussion about the 128K always turns into a bashing session and it just isn't fair. It's like comparing my Power Mac 6500 to my MacBook. I went out of my mind waiting for Adobe Photoshop to render an edit back then. The MacBook is like a dream come true for using Photoshop, except you know what, now I'm getting impatient with it. That's not a problem with the computer. It's a problem with what I want to do with it. And unlike JDW, I would venture that most people who bash the 128K never actually used it. Most of what I've read in this thread is anecdotal. Particularly the discussion about Jobs and Scully. A lot of it is just wrong too and nobody cites anything, so the mis-information abounds.