Apple with a Plus

Press, 28 January 1986, Page 24

Apple with a Plus

Mid-way through this month Apple announced a new version of its Macintosh personal computer with the long awaited enhancements in memory size, storage capacity and expandibiiity. The Macintosh Plus has one megabyte of memory and a floppy disc drive with a capacity of 800 K bytes. Extra ports out the badk of the Macintosh Plus provide a greater expansion capability, including a high speed interface conforming to the SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) standard. The Macintosh Plus will be available in New Zealand next month at a price of $6595. This is less than the current price oi the 512 K Macintosh. The price of the latter model will, however, drop to $4995.

(MacWrlte and MacPaint are included in the price of the 512 K Macintosh, but not in the Macintosh Plus.) Owners of existing Macintosh models can add all of the Macintosh Plus features by buying upgrade kits. The New Zealand distributor of Apple products expects applications software to run up to 50 per cent faster on the Macintosh Plus because of its larger memory, the faster disc drive

and improvements in the system software. A redesigned keyboard provides a numeric keypad and directional arrow keys (to complement the mouse). Starting at one megabyte, the memory capacity of the Macintosh will expand to four megabytes when one-me-gabit chips become available in quantity, says Apple. The new floppy disc drive can read existing Macintosh discs (which

are single-sided), put it win also be able to read double-sided discs providing twice the storage. Apple’s highly-re-garded laser printer, the Laser Writer, has ? also been upgraded. The- new Laser Writer. Pius now has one’megabyte of memory to store an additional seven font families. This gives a total of eleven f fonts, making 35 different type styles that a user can generate.