[jandrese]

I was being a bit tongue in cheek about Apple saving the IIci. But the ROM on the machine is hardwired to only support up to 10MB of memory, even if you drop in larger sticks that would otherwise be supported. There's no real reason to do this except to protect the higher priced products. But as you noted, there wasn't really a higher end product to protect because the LC was already crippled by its slow bus and obsolete CPU.

[lgg]

I think you missed my point. It wasn’t just ROM limited, the ram controller they used in the LC did not have enough address lines to address more than 4MB per SIMM slot, end of story. No amount of firmware hacking can ever make it support 16MB SIMMs without what amounts to a total board redesign. Given the 2MB soldered to the board (which took the address lines for two of the slots) that meant the machine was physically limited to 10MB unless you wanted to break out a soldering iron. Yes, the ROM has a software limit, but it reflected the actual limits of the HW (and more likely was due how the ROM went about detecting the ram then any explicit intent to limit things… it is not shocking that the software only works with supported physical configurations and not board reworks).

The LCII on the other hand is a bit less excusable since it could physically hold 12MB but only 10 was usable. As I said I suspect the reason is that it was a fairly quick revision they squeezes in before the redesigned LCIII and they just didn’t rev those parts of the ROM, but it still seemed pretty bad).

If you want more info there is a pretty deep dive on this here: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/technical-explanatio...