Restoring Apple's most BORING vintage Mac 

It's not boring -- it's humble!

Nice... I don't think these are boring at all. I remember pining over one when I was a 4th grader and trying to get my dad to buy me one. Compared to my CoCo2 and my Amstrad PC1512, it looked impressive to me! Now out of my collection of vintage all-in-ones, the Classic is the only one I have left to have recapped ;)

Im glad you showed the steps to discharge the CRT - an overlooked but EXTREMELY important step.

So many memories of the Mac Classic and Classic II. My High School and Middle School were full of them. They were usually setup for word-processing, and connected via Local Talk to a Laser Printer, using the PhoneNet adapters, and with a few setups, even connected to the wider network for file sharing and access to First Class Client email. I also recall using one in the 3rd Grade (1991-92), to create a Hypercard stack that controlled a LaserDisc Player, to display video and images about Japan for a class presentation.

I can assure you, people love these. I restore them almost daily. They all need new caps, both logic and analog board.

I just finished 3D printing a mini one of these to house a Raspberry Pi running MiniVMac, which was a project I didn’t even know about until I saw another one of your videos and led to the purchase of the 3D printer. I blame you entirely for that project and my new “boring” replica 😂

This takes me back. My first computer was a Mac Classic, which I bought (new) after doing my Masters degree thesis on a Macintosh Plus.

I'm glad you mentioned these for school usage, as I remember in 5th grade my class was selected to do a 2 day(Tuesdays, and Thursdays if I remember correctly) a week pilot program at the local college(USC Aiken) on computers, advanced math, science, and future tech, and the whole classroom we were in was full of Mac Classic machines all networked together over AppleTalk, and as someone who was a Commodore, and PC user at the time at home I was like where's the color?!?! 😅

11:45 You need a set of TV adjustment plastic screwdrivers, partly for safety but also because if you ever adjust CRT potentiometers the plastic is non-ferrous and won't interfere with the picture so your adjustments are accurate.

I bought one of these new. My first new Mac bought. Got it cheaper as was going to college. Loved it had it a few years. Never had a problem with it. Thx for the memories!

A Mac Classic was my first venture into vintage Macintoshs and thus it holds a special place in my collection:)

I know the SEs get a lot of love as people's favourite "Vintage Compact Mac" aesthetic, but I think a lot of people like me first encountered a Mac in their school: Mac Classics or Classic IIs.

The Classic was our family’s first Mac, after we declared our Apple //e to be just a little too out of date. The 2MB of RAM that it shipped with, with System 7 preinstalled, was way too light and the 4MB upgrade was done almost immediately. Have to admit, I didn’t know about the ROM disk…that would’ve been interesting to see.

My usual problem isn't taking anything apart… it's putting it back together! 😂😂🤦🤦

I've always liked the Macintosh Classic. I know it has a reputation for being boring, but the way I see it it's essentially a Macintosh Plus that benefits from being a newer design. It's capable of reading 1.44 MB floppies so it can interact with other computers more easily, and it doesn't suffer from some of the older hardware quirks of the earliest Macs. Once you see it as the Mac Plus experience but better, it's actually quite a nice machine to have.

I wish they had a store like you mentioned here in Florida! I used a Mac Classic teaching in the Mid 90s as my daily driver until I got a IIci with a huge B&W Monitor.

I almost bought one - an Office Max had a display model for $400, floppy drive only. I first went to pick up my check from work, and when I got there I found that I was the winner of a contest; the prize was a PowerBook 160, worth $2500. I still have that laptop.

The first computer I ever used was a Mac Classic. My dad would bring his home from work every now and then.

Great vid... Love my Mac Classic. 4M RAM is plenty if you are looking to relive that Monochrome compact Mac feel. And the Superdrive, with its ability to read MSDOS floppies makes transferring data/programs to/from it so much nicer... And as you mentioned, it was the first "affordable" Macintosh, and people sometimes forget how big a deal that was... Also, the ROM disk, while probably not a big deal back in the day, can come in REALLY handy nowadays to test the machine.... That said, if you are shopping for one and it only has 1M RAM, you probably want to think twice, because you REALLY want one that comes with that RAM board...

I just had a WAVE of nostalgia hit me with that close up of the Apple System Notification and the little talking head with the speech bubble. I remember having an Apple Color Classic II (running System 7, then 7.1, then eventually 7.5) as a kid and seeing that and thinking "this is so cool, it's like it's talking to me!" Damn! HAHA! I got my Color Classic II in . . . 6th grade? So that was, roughly, 28 years ago? HAHA! Damn.

Colin, I love watching your videos, and I love watching you do deep cleaning on parts. What drives me crazy is how you don't seem to the dust and dirt off other parts! You applied lubricant without cleaning it first!

Thanks for yet another superb video, Colin. Not the all too typical recap video but a very informative lesson in how an otherwise ignored machine fit into the vintage Mac history. Well done!!

This was the first Mac I owned outright back when I was in High school. Prior to this owned a TRS CoCo III and then a bare bones Panasonic DOS laptop. My dad had bought a Mac II used from a friend prior to this so I had experience with the Mac and I had used a Mac 512 in school before. My feeling at the time was that very in some ways “outdated” tech by 1990 when this was released, it also allowed people to buy a Mac for around $1000, which was unheard of, as the lowest end mac it replaced, the Mac Plus, was $2600. This Mac’s main strength was basic tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, black and white MacPaint type graphics, playing older monochrome Mac games, and whatever else was being done on the monochrome Macs like the 512K and Plus. Basically, all the tons of software that ran on the Mac 512k & Plus would mostly work fine in the Classic so there was a large library of software titles that ran on Classic. As a very entry level Mac it was fine if not the most exciting but it got the job done IMO.

(A) The moment you went to the not-B-roll for discharging the flyback transformer, I was all "yep, that's what you gotta be careful of…" I remember not having the grounding spike to do that and just waiting 24 hours (or more) for the charge to dissipate before cracking the case when I had to go inside my Plus back in the day. (B) That intro was PERFECT. (C) For some reason, I thought it was the Classic II with the ROM disk. I suppose it's been a while and my memory's just going. Just a great video overall!

You’re videos are always a bright spot in my day. 👏

What a pretty machine! Nice job on this one, I'm glad getting it back up to snuff wasn't terribly complicated👍🏼

Lots of hardware to play with in free time.

I still have fond memories of these in school. If someone was selling a fully restored, 'as new' one in Australia I'd snap it up in a heart beat

I really enjoyed so much all about this restoration, good job!!

I love how I've been watching your channel since I was 11 and I can still expect the same videos every time, best vintage tech channel imo. For context I'm 21 now lmao

This is one of the rare Mac Classic commentaries that actually puts this system into the correct and appropriate historical and economic context, and treats the machine with the respect it actually deserves. Those who decry this model in this day and age would do well to remember that thought: A computer with limited performance is better than no computer at all. Sales figures for the Classic prove that many people understood that in its day, even if it gets forgotten now.

The caps may not have been the issue for your issue, but if it’s going to be sold as a restored system at free geek with all the maintenance done, I really would suggest replacing the AB caps. They are notorious for going bad and leaking badly, Nichicon or not. They probably won’t last long before they go. Really enjoyed seeing another Mac fixed up though! Stuff like this, the IIsi video, other restorations, are my favorite stuff to watch here.

I always love your videos. Your voice is calming, and your video quality 👌

4:18 Never heard of this "sacraficial" cog before. Really interesting as I've found in a lot of Hifi the CD drives need a new cog. Cog discolours like seen in clip and just turns to cheese. Obviously people sell replacements now. Guess it's the same theory in them?

I remember the apple mac computers would make the quack quack sound whenever you clicked on something lol. Your youtube channel and tech moan are my go to youtube channels that I go to for vintage gear and vintage products since I'm subscribed to you and tech moan youtube.

I am a huge fan of your content, however if you have a mac classic please dont put off recapping the analog board. They tend to not show signs from.the front but the back. I have fixed too many to count.

Thanks for the battery reminder, I've been meaning to go take that battery out of my IIgs, and finally did it tonight. Dated 1991. Fortunately, still visually intact.

An SE would be nice to see again. Those machines were so cool.

Love these refurb/repair videos !

The video certainly was not boring. As a new Mac user (last year, M2 MBA and M2 Pro Mac mini), it's amazing to see how far the platform has come. I only used System 7 in school. More appropriately, At Ease, but I was one of those guys who could break out of At Ease and use System 7 underneath.

The Macintosh Classic wasn't fully bad, but it was the same specs as the Macintosh SE, but had less features. It also had a black and white screen, despite color Macs coming out at the same time. If you wanted more features for about the same price or more, you were more likely to get a Macintosh SE/30 or a Quadra/Centris.

When I was a postgrad in 1995 we had these in the university PC lab. They were connected somehow to our HP Unix system and had NCSA Mosaic installed for web browsing.

I grew up with one of these in my home. So thanks for making a video on it, even though you find it boring.

I just purchased an M4120. wont be able to open and assess if there's any damage until next week. Fingers crossed! Now I have to dabble with retro bright and all the possible rest. Thank you for this video, it was very helpful.

I was just listening to All About Chemistry this morning, which reminded me that I had a video of yours to look forward to. I'm saving this video for later so I can follow the steps to clean and lubricate the floppy drive for my SE/30. The motherboard, analog board, and Sony power supply are off getting cleaned and recapped now. I might buy one of the MacEffects cases to put them in once I get them back.

Boring? This thing was the most amazing thing I saw as a kid on school when they started putting them in classrooms. This is a piece of history.

Wow you are inspiring me to come back to electronics engineering, which I found old apple products quite a lot in many places in Thailand 😊

My high school received a large donation of those (along w/ a handful of IIs).

Thanks for sharing this. This is the first computer I can remember using back in the early 90s.

Glad my suggestion of turning up the voltage worked! 👍

Awesome restoration. Well done!

our first ever family computer was a Classic, we had it for about 3 or 4 years before we upgraded to a LC630 with FPU.

One fun thing we used to do was send a print to a LaserWriter SC (SCSI connected printer) using the ROM boot - the trick was to boot, type a message and send it to the printer - all before the screen fully warmed up!

Love these Mac classics, the perfect computer shape. Hard to find here!

Might stop by Free Geek during lunch today and give Roman some of my money for this object if its still there.

The mac classic was my first when I collected classic macs. I found the ROM boot to be a fascinating function. I had a 16mhz clip on cpu upgrade card at one point as well. It may have been an underpowered CPU but still a nice machine.

Dude I love your channel you’re the best and that clickbait-y title rules. You have to be Twin Cities’s best customer

Great vid as always, but did you fix the screen with the voltage change? At the end I saw scan lines. Might have been the camera?

Thanks Colin, very interesting as always. Do you ever get any 90s unix systems like Sun or SGI?

Nice! Memories of my first Mac - an SE 40/4.

I really like your videos. I have alot of macs, over 100 and I never even thought about maintenance seeing the floppy drives. Mine always worked fine you really dig deep but I enjoy your videos. What are you do with all the max that you work on?

hello Colin! Same calm video as always.

I didn’t know how to fix the screen wobble issue, thanks!

I’ll always be partial to the 030/040 era, but these are so iconic I can’t help but love them.

Hey I was wondering where you got your blue scsi (time stamp 5:59) from? I need one for my Apple Macintosh classic II, I just don't know where to even get one.

The Mac Classic was the first Mac model I ever used. At the time, I just figured they all had hard drives installed, because how else would you boot to a GUI-driven OS? It wasn't until much later that I learned that the first couple of Mac models couldn't even use a hard drive. I never thought much of the Mac Classic, personally. Once I got past the initial wow-factor that the Mac OS enjoyed over DOS, I found the thing was dog-slow compared to most everything that wasn't one of those terrible XT-class "entry level" PCs. Before I got my own computer, a 386SX that was no powerhouse itself, I had to use the school's Mac classics for my school work; just basic word processing on it was such a chore, it was so slow. There was one SE/30 that was available to us students, and I always wondered why it felt so much faster than the Classics despite looking so much older. Turns out it felt faster because it really was.

Just how much free space was left on the System 6 ROM? Could you actually install anything to the System suitcase while it was running? I'd love to see if OutSpoken would even run on this system, as I've been interested in getting a 68K machine for vintage accessibility testing.

Very well done. 👍

I was given a Mac Classic that was in beautiful shape. I changed out the PRAM, and it needed to be recapped. I decided to sell it off because it had a limited upgrade path and at the time I was obsessed with SE/30s . I regret selling it now, I never got a SE/30... 😅

Could you do a guide describing which tantalum caps are good and which ones are bad?

i so want a mac classic but they're so hard to obtain where i am and with being on disability. i had a mac se/30 growing up but when i first saw a mac classic in an acquaintance's house i fell in love and been wanting one for years. i owned a bunch of various mac desktops and laptops either given, boughten dirt cheap, or via ebay over the years. i do hope to get imac g5 i was given for free with accessories and software finally working again. i need to get logic board checked out or replaced i'm figuring.

Cool video. Gotta love a low-spec king.

Ok, that light switch being down for on is KILLING ME!

I like restoration projects on old vintage electronics, I wonder if those old CRT displays could be replaced with more modern and light weight LCDs

I would love to get one of these simply to do word processing and some basic accounting on.

I recapped my Mac Classic a while ago. I don't think I managed to remove a single one of the surface mount caps without lifting the pads a bit 😢. I hot glues the new caps in place thous. So hopefully they won't fall off. Apart from that problem it's working well after the recap :).

We had these at high school, we would goto the class early and help the teacher load all the macs prior to class so we could save time for that period of class. Most computer "nerds" back then in school were Commodore Amiga owners in my country and we were dumb founded by the price versus the Commodore Amiga who use the same CPU and a similiar GUI

We had a bunch of these in high school. We just typed papers on them. Eventually we got these color ones with clarisworks on them. Made the school newspaper on those. Ah, memories.

So you can soak any motherboard(including ones from laptops) in a Iso propylene bath? I never realized that you could do that to clean a motherboard. I love restoring old Lenovo Thinkpads and i wanted a way to clean the entire motherboard when it's out of the cage. Is there any special instructions on how to let it dry? Put it in the sun? Blow air on it?? Or just let it sit by itself?

I have a couple cousins that had Mac Classics back then. If I'd bought one, I would've gotten the $1500.00 config. Even in 1990, a Mac with no HDD and only 1 MB of RAM wasn't very useful IMHO, unless you were fine with floppy-swapping and running only System 6.X.X, LOL.

I'm not 100% sure if it was that Mac or not but remember playing Oregon Trail on it in the elementary school computer lab 😁

I bought a Mac Classic at a local market because it had a good backgammon game on it! This was in 1997 and it had a 40 MB HD, 4 MB of RAM and ran OS 7.0.3. After about a year, I needed a printer, the only way to get one at a reasonable price was to buy another computer and printer together on the used market. The replacement one also had 40 MB HD, 4 MB RAM and OS 7.0.3 but was a Classic II, quite a bit faster. People laughed at my funny little computer but within 35 seconds of boot-up I could be typing my first newsletter using WordPerfect. A few years later I needed access to a fax machine and bought another Classic I for $10 from a friend. It had an 80 MB HD, 10 MB of RAM and ran OS 7.6.1. I used an app called Fax STF and the Stylewriter II from the first Classic I to make a workable fax setup so I could receive my work assignments each morning before leaving home.

While the problem didnt seem to be capacitors you should really check under the large capacitors right near the main power wires to the motherboard, a couple of mine looked perfectly fine but had a fair bit of leakage hidden under the base of them. Another fault of these supplies that result in low or jittery voltage is the 1n4148 diodes near the optoisoltor.

This is the first Mac I saw in action and I thought it was fascinating XD We had a commodore at home and the Mac had no colors but on the other hand the Screeen was so sharp and the simple Layout/Text Software was so impressive. Especially when you print something, it looked like on the screen. Sure it was slow, but for me still impressive. Friends had a Windows 3.0 (not 3.1) PC at the time and I know Win 3.0 is supposed to be WYSIWYG - but I can say from hands on experience, it isn't.

So cool. Nice vidéo. I have 2 of these classics than I founded in the streeets in France., One black and white, one color but I did nothing to them... I will try at least to remove de battery if its not already too late...

Fascinating, not boring in the least. I had a Mac 512, and bought an under the mac external hard drive from (???.) I used Ready Set Go desk top publishing and More Outliner. I wrote a user manual for software that ran on a small main frame (mini-computer).

Where do you get these macs?

That computer got me through the first two years of uni…I give it respect (PowerBook 100 gets kudos)

Mac Classic was my first computer and still one of my favorite designs. I was very close to picking a Windows 3.1 clone (it had color!) but ultimately the Mac felt more friendly. Also (ironically) because I thought I could get free games from my friend with an SE/30. I’ve bought a firehose of Apple products ever since. The 2/40MB config was just fine for the time

So weird to think that this computer is what Army Officers had. Us children of Army Enlisted had Commodore 64's. The best we could hope for was a pirated copy of GEOS.

im currently trying to fix one of these but i cant get the disk to go in all the way. the drive clicks in place but the disk remains hooked on the entrance slot right before it enters all the way.

Also I know you have reservations about retrobrite but have you ever considered the "bath" method? Instead of applying cream to the plastic which can cause streaking, submerge the entire case in a hydrogen peroxide solution and leave it out in the sun (or under a UV lamp) which evenly brightens the case.

I purchased a Mac 128K back in the day and then upgraded it to a 512K fat Mac the hard way (though I put in sockets for the memory chips while Apple had not). Then later would get my first paying programming job writing software for a Mac Plus. So this form factor has a certain nostalgia feels to me. However, am not so inclined to collect any such vintage Mac in this form factor as I stay away from vintage computers that have integral CRTs - their [CRTs] days on this good Earth are surely numbered. Well, I do have an oscilloscope with a CRT that I'll never part with as it's a hand-me-down from the Los Alamos research labs. My one vintage CRT exception.

Our family had one when I was a kid. Not sure why - we already had a Mac IIcx - but maybe the Classic was so I could do homework and play basic games while my Dad used the IIcx ... And I do remember doing some word processing and games on the Classic, so I guess that worked out.

Apple Mac is a great computer for his time. Keep up the good job! Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands

These were the first modern Apple computers I used in Junior High and High School. This is when I loved Mac’s and hated Windows when it came out.

There's a Plus near me with a wobbly monitor for a few hundred bucks. This video confirms my thoughts that I'm not good enough to repair it myself.

Apple should release a sort of special edition Mac that is basically a 1980s Mac shell but with their latest hardware.

Colin, about those tantalums, but that's just my humble opinion: I'd rather have an electolyte spill and a bit of corosion than a fire in my apartment. Maybe take a look at MLCCs. These modern multi layer ceramic capacitors are very safe as they don't catch on fire like tantalums do. Might also be cheaper in some cases, not sure though. But if we can avoid tantalums I think it is also bit better for the environment in the long run or at least we save them for those cases where there's no alternative.

Any reason for why you wanna use tantalum caps? It doesn't seem like they have a longer lifespan, and I've read that they can fail spectacularly.