Power Macintosh 4400

The Power Macintosh 4400 (also known as the Power Macintosh 7220 in some markets) is a mid-to-high-end Macintosh personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from 1996 until 1998. The Power Macintosh 4400 was rather different from most other Macintosh models, in that the floppy disk drive is on the left rather than right, and like the Centris 650, the casing is made of metal rather than plastic. Apple did this to reduce production costs, in addition to using more industry standard components such as an IDE hard drive and an ATX power supply.

It was also available in a PC compatible system with a 166 MHz DOS card containing 16 MB of RAM and a Cyrix 6x86 processor. The first 4400 model was only sold to the Europe market, an updated 200 MHz 603e model was released in the United States in February 1997 as the Power Macintosh 4400.

The Power Macintosh 4400 is known as the Power Macintosh 7220 in Australia and Asia, where the number 4 is considered unlucky.

Power Macintosh

Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a line of Apple Macintosh workstation-class personal computers based on various models of PowerPC microprocessors that were developed, marketed, and supported by Apple Inc. from March 1994 until August 2006. The first models were the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100, and 8100, which offered speeds ranging from 60 to 110 MHz. These machines replaced Apple's Quadra series of personal computers, and were housed in cases very similar to systems sold by Apple up to that point. The Power Mac went on to become the mainstay of Apple's top-end offerings for twelve years, through a succession of case designs, four major generations of PowerPC chips, and a great deal of press coverage, design accolades, and technical controversy. In August 2006, the Power Mac's retirement was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference by Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller, making way for its Intel-based replacement, the Mac Pro.

Models

Old World ROM

Power Macintosh 9600

The Power Macintosh 9600 (Codename: "Kansas"; also sold with additional server software as the Apple Workgroup Server 9650) is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Power Macintosh series of Macintosh computers. It was introduced in February 1997 alongside the Power Macintosh 7300 and the Power Macintosh 8600, and replaced the Power Macintosh 9500 as Apple's flagship desktop computer. It was the last Macintosh model able to boot and run System 7 natively.

The 9600 came in the same new case as the 8600, but was internally very similar to the 9500 that preceded it, with 12 RAM slots and 6 PCI slots instead of the 8 RAM and 3 PCI slots on the 8600. The 9600 used the new PowerPC 604e CPU, an enhanced version of the 9500 604. On introduction, three processor configurations were available: single 200 MHz, dual 200 MHz and single 233 MHz. In August 1997, they were replaced by two new models, with a single 300 MHz or 350 MHz "Mach 5" 604ev with a larger L2 cache. The 350 MHz model was initially discontinued in October due to CPU supply problems, but reintroduced on February 17 when the 300 MHz model was discontinued in favor of the new Power Macintosh G3 minitower - while the G3 was faster, its expandability was only on par with the 8600, so the 9600 was kept available until March for users that needed that kind of expandability.

Power Macintosh G3 beige

The Power Macintosh G3, commonly called "beige G3s" or "platinum G3s" for the color of their cases, is a series of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from November 1997 to January 1999. It was the first Macintosh to use the PowerPC G3 (PPC750) microprocessor, and replaced a number of earlier Power Macintosh models, in particular the 7300, 8600 and 9600 models. It was succeeded by the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White), which kept the name but introduced a radically different design. The introduction of the Desktop and Minitower G3 models coincided with Apple starting to sell user-configurable Macs directly from its web site in an online storeArchived May 9, 1998 at the Wayback Machine, which was unusual for the time as Dell was the only other major manufacturer then doing this.

The Power Mac G3 introduced a fast and large Level 2 backside cache to Apple's product lineup, running at half processor speed. As a result, these machines were widely considered to be faster than Intel PCs of similar CPU clock speed at launch, an assertion that was backed up by benchmarks performed by Byte Magazine, which prompted Apple to create the "Snail" and "Toasted Bunnies" television commercials.