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Hopefully these upload right

1 peripheral
2 peripheral
3 low telco

Repeat

1 peripheral
2 low telco
3 peripheral
4 peripheral
5 low telco
6 peripheral

1 peripheral
2 peripheral
3 peripheral
4 low telco
5 peripheral
6 peripheral

1 peripheral
2 peripheral
3 peripheral
4 midgrade
5 peripheral
6 peripheral

1 peripheral
2 low telco
3 peripheral
4 peripheral
5 backplane
6 midgrade

1 —>
2 low telco
3 peripheral
4 laptop motherboard
5 low telco
6 low telco

Let’s look at my thought process for grading hard cases
My assumption is the ISA sockets are tin. As is normal.
Nickel in the memory sockets and for pins.
Some gold pin connectors.
At least peripheral. Definitely not backplane.
So a motherboard? Well there’s no bridge chip. No cpu socket. And a reduced I/o port count. But we have the plastic 486 package and a VIA controller.
It looks like we have a triple layer board. That less than the standard 4 layer motherboard. A reduced architecture x86. And no bridge.
I’m calling peripheral here.

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I noticed you graded the apple motherboard as a laptop motherboard.
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iMacs are an exception to the rule based on manufacturing. This older board is pushing the limit of that non-rule bit its still close enough to make the call, from my standpoint.

When you compare this to the same era (years) laptops from non-Apple manufacturers you’ll find 100% matched consistency to the gaming laptops of each generation in 18-24 inch class desktop replacements.


I’m not Chris but personally I’ve never paid less than laptop rate for an iMac motherboard. And while Chris has his reasons one of the very few places we differ is I’ll pay his high telco rate on Apple TV boards. You’d be really lucky to find an android streaming board I’d pay more than Boardsort’s peripheral rate for.

Sorry Mac fans: the iMac is simply the best packaged and marketed laptop in history.

Modern all-in-one motherboards will generally fall into laptop category due to the reduction aspect.

What many people miss is a high end MacBook Pro is nearly identical, in specs and board, to an iMac.
As far as I’m concerned if the board layout, components, and design is the same (give/take a few minor components), the class is the same as well.

Congratulations: I believe your the first person in my history here to question my overgrading. Aside from Chris who has said dial it back on a rare occasion.
:)

Apple is one of the best ever when it comes to supply chain reduction. I personally think the ONLY, sole, attempt at reduction that was on par with Apple today was Ford in the model A and T etc assembly.

The reality is if you dropped a MacBook Pro and iMac 21ish inch motherboard from matched generations on a table it wouldn’t be sight that let me tell you which is which.
As such I’m firm in my grade. And back it 100%
Laptop.

As a side note:
For all the crap apple gets for prices they’re the most consistent when it comes to pricing raw boards. You can line up laptops to iMacs. iPads to iPhones.
Remove realistic screen costs and the products are truly properly priced in their home environment.

Compare that to, say, hp that uses an identical motherboard in a top-tier windows 10 pro tablet and an entry level all in one.
Now explain to me how the less expensive smaller screen of lower resolution 1080p 8b makes the tablet slate worth $1300 and the 1080p 12b hdr AIO is $650... with every other non-screen spec identical using the same motherboard?

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OK. That makes sense. Thanks for the long explanation.

That board should make a nice payout though. It looks like it should weigh at least a pound. That's not bad for a single board.

Thanks again.

So it’s a motherboard from an 80s Tandy tower. I would have sold it on eBay but there is literally nothing to go off of I spent hours researching various numbers on the board as well as the tower itself to no luck. Everything in that assumption was pretty much spot on. However I don’t know about the layering nor how to tell. The main thing that left me with no idea what to put it as was the cpu soldered onto the board.

I figured Tandy (RadioShack) or sears.

Both sold microcomputers as “PCs” that were not really PC compatible. Some software and hardware worked. Most didn’t.
If all you wanted was to type documents in Microsoft word or VisiCalc you were fine. Don’t bother with games. Except what was sold at sears or RadioShack.
This was the second round of the “let’s be different” wars.

IBM set off the first war when they ditched standard ports and bus in the later PS and 300 line systems.

Then a bunch of mini retailers went to slimmed down not-quite-PCs in the late 80s and early 90s. Like here.

Third war was in the late 90s when Dell and HP went to custom bus implementations.

4th was LGA vs PGA in the 2000s. That’s still happening.

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My guess would be 90-92 for that system. Tandy didn’t switch to x86-32 until 88-90. They used 16-bit B&H and WE chips and a translator for x86-16. Allowing them to run the Tandy 8 bit back catalogue without paying for intel chips to run the current crop of software.

These run in the $10-$20 range on average for working systems. +shipping.

I find they’re not worth the trouble.

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