> a classically Jobsian product: fascinated with aesthetics and style, disinterested in performance and expandability.

That's the description for a Jobsian consumer product.

All the previous Mac Pro designs (and Xserve designs!) were greenlighted under Jobs, and it's obvious that tons of thought was put into their expandability and maintainability.

The obvious example is the PowerMac G5 with its screwless design (before that was at-all common); but looking further back, you've got things like the PowerMac G3, where most of the computer lived on a slide-out tray (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PowerMac+G3+All-In-One+Teard...).

The G3 AIO was obviously an "aesthetic" product (however people might feel about the aesthetics of said "Molar Mac") but it was also built to serve the education market, not the consumer market, so it had maintainability as a goal.

> But the original Mac was also hobbled in important ways to fit Jobs' vision; it came with just 128K of RAM (low even by the standards of the time)

This was about cost savings! Same strategy as Nintendo: cheap parts + lots of value-add in integration and software = huge profit margin. (But, unlike modern Nintendo, early Apple did this out of necessity—a risky investment into a new product line when you don't have much capital is even riskier if you have to make minimum purchase orders for large quantities of expensive parts. May as well design the first one to be low-end, and then, if you can't sell it, repurpose the low-end parts for something else, like, say, disk drive controllers.)

> no mechanism was provided for adding expansion cards or other upgrades inside the enclosure

I'm not sure why they did this for the Mac 128K, but I'd guess it was simply that there wasn't room on the motherboard, with the motherboard constrained by the tiny case (where the form-factor of the case was part of the value-prop of the Macintosh product: it fit on your desk without stealing your desk.)

Look at the 128K's motherboard (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Macintosh+128K+Teardown/2142... )—there's no room there to add anything.

> It took two years for Apple to come out with a version that included a SCSI port!

The Macintosh 128k was essentially meant to be an all-in-one, classy "8-bit micro" (at only a slightly higher price than one, once you factor in the price of the included color computer monitor in the 1980s.) It's competitors were Amiga, Amstrad, Commodore, etc. Nobody else in that world used SCSI ports either.

Apple basically noticed the reaction creative professionals had to their not-originally-intended-for-creative-professionals product, and then started adding "pro" features to it (while still never thinking of the Macintosh line as for professionals, until the popularity of Macs pushed them to eliminate their other lines.)

> The Mac II was the start of the long line of high-performance Macs that would make the Mac the go-to computer for people in creative industries.

Note that the Macintosh SE continued this trend, and yet returned to the lunch-box form-factor. The difference was that, by then, the chips on the motherboard had miniaturized enough to let them stick some expansion sockets on it as well.