Clone users were getting all too familiar with the IRQ and memory-address conflicts that could result from plugging two cards that were determined not to play nice together into the same machine, and software developers were getting used to chasing down obscure bugs that only popped up when their programs ran on certain combinations of hardware. One had only to glance over at the IBM clone market - always Jobs’s first choice as the antonym to the Mac - to see how chaotic a totally open platform could be. He wasn’t entirely without concrete arguments to back up his position. Jobs would reply that the whole point of the Macintosh was to change how computers worked, and with them the workings of the computer market. At some level, it seemed, this just wasn’t how the computer market worked. It was a little hard in January of 1984 not to question the wisdom of shipping an essentially unexpandable appliance with just 128 K of memory and a single floppy-disk drive for a price of $2495. Yet some members of the tiny team he put together, fiercely loyal to their leader and his vision of a “computer for the rest of us” though they were, were beginning to question the wisdom of this aspect of the machine by the time the Macintosh came together in its final form. When Jobs took over the Macintosh project - some, including Raskin himself, would say stole it - he changed just about every detail except this one. In contrast to Steve Wozniak’s beloved hacker plaything, Raskin’s computer for the people would be as effortless to set up and use as a stereo, a television, or a toaster. The absence of slots was one of the bedrock attributes of Raskin’s original vision for the Macintosh, the most immediately obvious difference between it and Apple’s then-current flagship product, the Apple II. Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs didn’t agree on much, but they did agree on their loathing for expansion slots.

original Macintosh team-member Andy Hertzfeld It was a valid point of view, even somewhat courageous, but not very practical, because things were still changing too fast in the computer industry for it to work, driven by the relentless tides of Moore’s Law. But the problem wasn’t really technical as much as philosophical, which was that we wanted to eliminate the inevitable complexity that was a consequence of hardware expandability, both for the user and the developer, by having every Macintosh be identical. The biggest problem with the Macintosh hardware was pretty obvious, which was its limited expandability.

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