[3] The original Macintosh LC was introduced in October 1990, with initial shipments to dealers following in December and January.

The LC's memory management chipset places a limit of 10 MB RAM no matter how much was installed.

Many programs written for color Macintosh II family computers had assumed this as a minimum, and some were unusable at the lower resolution.

Overall, general performance of the machine was disappointing due to the crippling data bus bottleneck, making it run far slower than the 16 MHz 68020-based Macintosh II from 1987, which had an identical processor but ran almost twice as fast.

If the single expansion slot was a limitation, multifunction cards were available combining Ethernet functionality with an MMU or FPU socket.

The Apple IIe Card for the PDS slot was offered in a bundle with education models of the LCs.

The combination of a low-cost color Macintosh with Apple IIe compatibility was intended to encourage the education market to transition from aging Apple II models to the Macintosh platform instead of to the new low-cost IBM PC compatibles.