[12] Jobs instead wanted higher-resolution monochrome displays[13] such as the ones chosen for his own "BigMac" project begun in 1984 to develop a Macintosh successor.

[14] Initially referred to as "Little Big Mac", the Macintosh II was codenamed "Milwaukee" after Dhuey's hometown, and it later went through a series of new names.

[14] The Macintosh II was introduced at the AppleWorld 1987 conference in Los Angeles,[15] with low-volume initial shipments starting two months later.

[22] AnimEigo notably used the Macintosh II for subtitling their earliest releases, including MADOX-01, Riding Bean, and Vampire Princess Miyu,[23] and Industrial Light & Magic used the Macintosh II for image processing on films such as The Abyss.

The machine shipped with a socket for an optional Motorola 68851 MMU, but an "Apple HMMU Chip" (VLSI VI475 chip) was installed by default and could not implement virtual memory (instead, it translated 24-bit addresses to 32-bit addresses for the Mac OS, which would not be 32-bit clean until System 7).

The Macintosh IIx ROMs that also shipped with the FDHD upgrade fixed this problem, though still do not have a 32-bit Memory Manager and cannot boot into 32-bit addressing mode under Mac OS (without the assistance of MODE32).

[27] MODE32 contained a workaround that allowed larger SIMMs to be put in Bank B with the PMMU installed.

With an optional RAM upgrade (requiring 120 ns DIP chips), the 4-bit version supports 640×480 in 8-bit color.

It is possible to connect as many as six displays to a Macintosh II by filling all of the NuBus slots with graphics cards.

[25] The original ROMs in the Macintosh II contained a bug that prevented the system from recognizing more than one megabyte of memory address space on a Nubus card.

[30] Apple offered a well-publicized recall of the faulty ROMs and released a program to test whether a particular Macintosh II had the defect.

All systems included a mouse and a single 800 KB 3.5-inch floppy disk drive; a Motorola 68851 PMMU was available as an option and required for running A/UX.