How many Macintosh computers have been sold?

Macintosh computers, especially the color Macs starting with the Macintosh II in 1987, had always been rather expensive computers with large profit margins. The original LC was an attempt at an affordable Macintosh. Compared with earlier Macs, Apple cut some corners on performance and features in order to keep the price down. Notably, the LC used a very small "pizza box" case with no NuBus slots, had a 16 MHz 68020 microprocessor and no floating-point coprocessor running on a 16-bit data bus (a major bottleneck as the 68020 was a 32-bit CPU), a limit of 10 megabytes RAM and shipped with only 256 kB of VRAM therefore only supporting a display resolution of 512 pixels by 384 pixels at 8-bit color on Apple's 12" RGB monitor. The VRAM was upgradeable to 512 kB though, supporting a display resolution of 512 pixels by 384 pixels at 16-bit color or, on a VGA-compatible display, 640 pixels by 480 pixels at 8-bit color. Nevertheless, most LCs were purchased with an Apple 12" RGB monitor with a fixed resolution of 512 pixels by 384 pixels. Many software programs that had been designed for other color Macs assumed that the minimum screen size was 640 pixels by 480 pixels. As a result, some programs simply would not function correctly on the LC, and for several years software developers had to add support for this smaller screen resolution in order to guarantee that their software would run on LCs. Overall, general performance of the machine was disappointing due to the crippling data bus bottleneck, making it run far slower than it should have been (e.g. the same 16 MHz 68020 based Macintosh II ran almost twice as fast as the Macintosh LC).