As the covers for both the November 10, 1992 and November 24, 1992 PC Magazines are missing on Google Books, I’ve had to skip ahead to BYTE. This issue’s cover story looked at low-cost yet name-brand computers, if with some cautions for what this might mean for the industry. A higher-end computer also snuck onto the cover to promote a story about “Stalking the Ultimate Workstation.”

The Performa 600 appeared alone on this issue’s cover, with the two cheaper consumer computers (a rebadged Classic II and a rebadged LC II) a sidebar inside. In noting the metal in the Performa 600′s case, there was a suggestion Apple intended to keep it in production for a long time. The series going “inside your computer” continued with a discussion of how things worked together inside the CPU box.

Rebadging its two low-end Macs and adding a new third model more formidable than the three-years-old IIci, then promising bundled software and sales outlets beyond the dealers that had handled their computers so far, Apple made a push towards “the 7 million or so” households that could “afford to buy a home computer but so far have stubbornly resisted the temptation,” as this issue put it. (In his regular back-page column, John C. Dvorak proclaimed the Performas going on sale at Sears “prove that the end is near” for the Macintosh platform, and suggested an assortment of strange names for the RISC-powered machines that would follow.)

1993