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ThePower Macintosh, laterPower Mac, is a family ofpersonal computers designed, manufactured, and sold byApple Computer, Inc as the core of theMacintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006.
Described byMacworld as "the most important technical evolution of the Macintosh since theMac II debuted in 1987",[1] it is the first computer with thePowerPC CPU architecture, the flagship product of theAIM alliance. Existing software for theMotorola 68k processors of previous Macintoshes do not run on it natively, so aMac 68k emulator is in System 7.1.2. It provides good compatibility, at about two-thirds of the speed of contemporaryMacintosh Quadra machines.[1]
The Power Macintosh replaced the Quadra and was initially sold in the same enclosures.[2] Over the next twelve years, it evolved through a succession of enclosure designs, a rename to "Power Mac", five major generations of PowerPC chips, and a great deal of press coverage, design accolades, and controversy about performance claims. It was discontinued as part of theMac transition to Intel processors announced in 2005, making way for its replacement, theMac Pro.
The first public demonstration of the new Power Macintosh — specifically, a prototype of what would become thePower Macintosh 6100 – was at an Apple Pacific sales meeting in Hawaii in October 1992.[3] The demo was a success, and in the following months, the product plan expanded to include three models: the entry-level 6100, a mid-range7100 housed in theMacintosh IIvx's desktop case, and a high-end8100 based on theQuadra 800's mini-tower case. A fourth project, theMacintosh Processor Upgrade Card, was started in July 1993 to provide a straightforward upgrade path to owners of Centris- and Quadra-based Macintosh computers.[3]: 23 The importance of this was especially significant for the Quadra 700, 900, and 950, which were not going to receive full logic board replacements. Computers upgraded in this fashion received new names such as "Power Macintosh Q650" and "Power Macintosh 900".
The original plan was to release the first Power Macintosh machine on January 24, 1994, exactly ten years after the release of thefirst Macintosh.[3]: 26 Ian Diery, who was EVP and general manager of the Personal Computer Division at the time, moved the release date back to March 14 in order to give manufacturing enough time to build enough machines to fill the sales channels and to ensure that the Macintosh Processor Upgrade Card would be available at the same time. This was a departure from prior practice at Apple; they had typically released upgrade packages months after the introduction of new Macintoshes.
The Power Macintosh was formally introduced at theLincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan on March 14. Pre-orders for the new Power Macintosh models were brisk, with an announced 150,000 machines already having been sold by that date.[4] MacWorld's review of the 6100/60 noted that "Not only has Apple finally regained the performance lead it lost about eight years ago when PCs appeared using Intel's 80386 CPU, but it has pushed far ahead."[5] The performance of 680x0 software is slower due to the emulation layer, but MacWorld's benchmarks showed noticeably faster CPU, disk, video, and floating-point performance than the Quadra 610 it replaced. By January 1995, Apple had sold 1 million Power Macintosh systems.
Speed-bumped versions of the Power Macintosh line were introduced at the beginning of 1995, followed in April by the firstPowerPC 603 models: an all-in-one model called thePower Macintosh 5200 LC and a replacement for theQuadra 630 called thePower Macintosh 6200.Performa variants of these machines were sold as well, continuing the practice of re-branding other Macintosh models for sale in department stores and big-box electronics retailers. While the 5200 LC was well received by critics for its design, performance, and cost, both it and the 6200 suffered from stability issues (and in the case of the 5200, display issues as well) that could only be solved by bringing the machine to an Apple dealer for replacement parts.[6]
By mid-1995, the burgeoning Power Macintosh line had all but completely supplanted every prior Macintosh line, with only the high-endQuadra 950 and two low-cost education models (the all-in-oneMacintosh LC 580 and desktopLC 630) remaining in production. The competitive marketplace for "accelerator cards" that had existed for earlier Macintosh systems largely disappeared due to the comparatively low price of Apple's Macintosh Processor Upgrade Card (US$600).[7]DayStar Digital sold upgrade cards for the IIci and various Quadra models, and full motherboard replacements were available from Apple as well.Macintosh clones from companies likeDayStar Digital andPower Computing were also coming to the market at this time, undercutting Apple's prices.
When the Power Macintosh was introduced, it included the same internal and external expansion connections as other Macintosh models, all of which (save for audio input and output) were either wholly proprietary to, or largely exclusive to Apple computers. Over the next five years, Apple replaced all these ports with industry-standard connectors.
The first generation of Power Macintoshes had shipped with NuBus, but by the end of 1993, it was becoming clear that Intel'sPCI bus was going to be the widely adopted future of internal expansion.[8] Apple's position as a relatively small player in the larger personal computer market meant that few device manufacturers invested in creating both NuBus- and PCI-compatible versions of their cards. The first PCI-based system was the range-toppingPower Macintosh 9500, introduced in May 1995. This was followed shortly afterwards by the introduction of the "Power Surge" line of second-generation Power Macintosh systems – thePower Macintosh 7200,7500 and8500. The 8500 and 9500 were built around the newPowerPC 604, offering speeds starting at 120 MHz.[9]InfoWorld's review of the 8500 showed a speed improvement in their "business applications suite" benchmark from 10 minutes with the 8100/100, to 7:37 for the 8500/120. They also noted that the 8500 runs an average of 24 to 44 percent faster than a similarly clockedIntel Pentium chip, increasing to double on graphics and publishing tasks.
The transition to PCI continued into 1996, with the introduction of the all-in-one 5400, desktop 6300/160 (usually sold as a Performa 6360), and mini-tower 6400 models. The success of theMacintosh clone market also prompted Apple to produce its own inexpensive machine using parts and production techniques that were common in both the clone market and theWintel desktop market at the time. ThePower Macintosh 4400 (sold as a 7220 in Asia and Australia) employed bent sheet metal instead of plastic for its case internals, and included a standardATX power supply.
Alongside the transition to PCI, Apple began a gradual transition away fromSCSI hard disks toIDE as a cost-saving measure, both for themselves and for users who wanted to upgrade their hard drives. The low-end 5200 and 6200 were the first to adopt IDE internal drives, though Apple's proprietary 25-pin externalSCSI connector remained. The beige Power Macintosh G3 models being the last to include SCSI drives as standard, and it was the last Macintosh to include the external SCSI connector. When thePower Macintosh G3 (Blue and White) was introduced in early 1999, the port was replaced by twoFireWire 400 ports. The Blue and White G3 was also the last Macintosh to includeApple Desktop Bus ports, a proprietary technology created bySteve Wozniak to connect keyboards, mice andsoftware protection dongles such as those fromAvid Technology.[10] TwoUSB ports were also included, making this the only Power Macintosh to include both ADB and USB.
Another port that was retired during this time is theApple Attachment Unit Interface. This was a proprietary version of the industry-standardAttachment Unit Interface connector for10BASE5 Ethernet that Apple had created to avoid confusion with the 15-pin connector that Apple used for connecting external displays.[11] The AAUI port required a costly external transceiver to connect to a network. By the early 1990s, the networking industry was coalescing around the10BASE-T connector, leading Apple to include this port alongside AAUI in mid-1995, starting with thePower Macintosh 9500. The Power Macintosh G3 excluded the AAUI port.
ThePower Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) was released in the second half of 1999; it was the first Power Macintosh to include only industry-standard internal and external expansion. For some years afterwards, a number of third parties createddongles that provided backwards compatibility to users of newer Power Mac systems with old hardware. This included companies like Griffin Technology, MacAlly Peripherals, Rose Electronics and many others. In some cases, these companies produced adapters that matched the aesthetic design of the Power Mac.[12]
Shortly afterSteve Jobs' return to Apple in 1997,Jony Ive was appointed senior vice president of industrial design. Building on the critical and commercial success of theiMac, Ive and his team created an entirely new case design for the Power Macintosh G3, combining many of the aesthetic principles of the iMac (curves, translucent plastics, use of color) with the ease-of-access characteristics of the company's popular "Outrigger" Macintosh models from previous years. The result was thePower Macintosh G3 (Blue and White), a machine that received considerable plaudits from reviewers, includingPC Magazine's Technical Excellence Award for 1999.[13] "The Power Mac provides the fastest access to the insides of a computer we've ever seen," they wrote. "Just lift a handle and a hinged door reveals everything inside." This case design, code-named "El Capitan",[14] was retained through the entire lifetime of the Power Mac G4. The introduction of the Blue and White G3 mini-tower also marked the end of the desktop and all-in-one Power Macintosh case designs, the latter being replaced by theiMac.
A second model called thePower Mac G4 Cube was introduced in 2000, which fitted the specifications of a mid-range Power Mac G4 into a cube less than 9" in each axis. This model was on sale for about a year before being discontinued, and was not considered a sales success (150,000 units were sold, about one-third of Apple's projections),[15] but the distinctive design of both the computer and its accompanyingHarman Kardon speakers prompted theMuseum of Modern Art inNew York City to retain them in their collection.[16]
The PowerPC chips in the G3 and G4 became a central part of Apple's branding and marketing for the Power Macintosh. For example, the Blue and White G3 features the letters "G3" on the side that are fully one-third the height of the entire case, a significant departure from the small labels typically used on prior Macintosh computers. And when the Power Mac G4 was introduced, print ads included pictures of the G4 chip and mentioned itsAltiVec instruction set by its own marketing name, "Velocity Engine".[17] A related element of Apple's marketing strategy, especially after mid-2001, was to highlight what they described as the "Megahertz myth", challenging the belief that a processor's clock speed is directly correlated with performance. This had become important with the introduction of Intel'sPentium 4, which featured significantly higherclock speeds than competing chips from Sun, IBM, andAMD, but without a corresponding performance benefit.
The company's public presentations –Stevenotes in particular – often featured lengthy segments pitting a high-poweredCompaq orDell computer against the Power Macintosh in a series of benchmarks and scripted tasks, usually inAdobe Photoshop.[18] These presentations often showed the Power Macintosh besting Intel's Pentium chips by margins significantly exceeding 50%, but independent benchmarks did not bear this out. InfoWorld reviewer Jennifer Plonka reported that the 400 MHz G3 was 11% slower than a comparably-specced Pentium II-450 in an Office applications suite test, while Photoshop 5.0 was faster by 26%.[19] And in 2003,Maximum PC ran a variety of gaming, Photoshop andLightWave 3D benchmarks, and reported that the Dual 1.25 GHz G4 system was about half the speed of a dual-processor IntelXeon Prestonia 2.8 GHz system.[20] A related criticism leveled at Power Mac systems from this time, particularly the G4 Mirrored Drive Doors, was the increased fan noise level compared to older systems.[21][22]
By the time thePower Mac G5 was unveiled at Apple'sWorldwide Developers Conference in July 2003, Apple's desktop range had fallen significantly behind competing computers in performance. The G5 closed much of this gap by moving to thePowerPC 970 processor with clock speeds up to 2.0 GHz, and a full 64-bit architecture. It also introduced a significantly revised enclosure design, replacing the use of plastics withanodized aluminum alloy.
Reviews were generally positive. InfoWorld described the G5 as "Apple's best work yet", and said it "delivers on the present need for rapid computing, deep multitasking, and responsive user interfaces — as well as the future need for mainstream computers that rapidly process and analyze massive data sets."[23] PC Magazine again awarded the Power Mac G5 with its Award for Technical Excellence for 2003.[24] However, the G5's heavy weight (10 pounds more than the previous year's Quicksilver Power Mac G4), limited internal expansion options, issues withground loop, and noise in the single-processor models'power supply units resulted in significant criticism of the product.[25] Apple also continued to make unsubstantiated performance claims about the new Power Mac. This resulted in theAdvertising Standards Authority for the United Kingdom banning Apple from using the phrase "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer" to describe the Power Mac G5 after independent tests carried out by theBroadcast Advertising Clearance Centre determined the claim to be false.[26] Another claim made by Steve Jobs at the 2003Worldwide Developers Conference was that the company would be selling a 3 GHz G5 by mid-2004; this never happened.[27]
Three generations of Power Mac G5 were released before it was discontinued during theMac transition to Intel processors. The announcement of the transition came in mid-2005, but the third generation of G5 systems was introduced towards the end of 2005. Most notably in this generation was the introduction of a Quad-core 2.5 GHz system. Not only was this the first Apple computer with four processing cores, it was the first to incorporatePCI Express instead ofPCI-X for internal expansion.[28] It also required anIEC 60320 C19 power connector that was more common on rackmounted server hardware, instead of the industry-standard C13 connector used with personal computers.
The official end to thePower Macintosh line came at the 2006 Worldwide Developers Conference, wherePhil Schiller introduced its replacement, theMac Pro. The G5's enclosure design was retained for the Mac Pro and continued to be used for seven more years, making it among the longest-lived designs in Apple's history.[29]
The Power Macintosh models can be broadly classified into two categories, depending on whether they were released before or after Apple introduced its "four quadrant" product strategy in 1998. Before the introduction of thePower Macintosh G3 (Blue and White) in 1999, Apple had shipped Power Macintosh-labelled machines in nine different form factors, some of which were carry-overs from pre-PowerPC product lines, such as theQuadra/Centris 610 and theIIvx. This was reduced to one model in the new product strategy, with the exception of thePower Mac G4 Cube in 2000 and 2001.
Apple named Power Macintosh models from this period after the first pre-PowerPC model of Macintosh to use a particular form factor, followed by a slash and the speed of the CPU. For example, the Power Macintosh 6300/120 uses theQuadra 630's form factor and has a120 MHz CPU.
Machines with "AV" in their name denote variants that include extended audio-video capabilities.
Machines with "PC Compatible" or "DOS Compatible" in their name include aseparate card with an x86-compatible CPU, typically a486 orPentium; these models are therefore capable of runningMS-DOS andMicrosoft Windows applications, typicallyWindows 3.1 (for earlier PC Compatible machines pre-1995) orWindows 95 (for later PC Compatible machines since 1995).
Machines with "MP" in their name denote machines that include two CPUs.
These early models had two distinct generations. The first generation uses thePowerPC 601 and603 processors and used the oldNuBus/PDS expansion slots, while the second generation uses the faster 603e, 604 and 604e chips as well as industry-standardPCI expansion slots. The second generation also makes use ofOpen Firmware, allowing them to more easily boot alternate operating systems (includingOS X viaXPostFacto), thoughuse of various hacks was still necessary.
The Power Macintosh 4400 is a desktop case with a height of5.4 inches, suitable for horizontal placement with a monitor on top.
The Power Macintosh 5200 is an all-in-one form factor with specifications and internal designs similar to the Quadra 630. Collectively these machines are sometimes referred to as the "Power Macintosh/Performa 5000 series".
The Quadra 610 form factor is a low-profile "pizza-box" design with a height of3.4 inches, intended to be placed on a desktop with a monitor on top.
The Quadra 630 form factor is a horizontally-oriented design with a height of4.3 inches, suitable for placing a monitor on top.
The Performa 6400 form factor is a mini-tower design, suitable for being placed beside a monitor.
TheIIvx form factor is a horizontally-oriented desktop form factor with a height of6 inches, suitable for placing a monitor on top.
The Power Macintosh 7500 form factor is a horizontally-oriented desktop design with a height of6.15 inches, suitable for placing a monitor on top.
The Quadra 800 form factor is a mini-tower design, with a width of7.7 inches.
The Power Macintosh 9600 form factor is a mini-tower design with a width of9.7 inches.
Starting with the Power Macintosh G3, Apple changed its product naming to include the generation of PowerPC CPU, with the name of the form factor or a key feature afterwards in brackets.
The all-in-one models would eventually be spun off into theiMac line, whilst the compact form factor models would be spun off into theMac Mini.
The Power Mac G5's name was changed to incorporate the time period in which the model was released.
ThePower Mac brand name was used for Apple's high-endtower style computers, targeted primarily at businesses and creative professionals, in differentiation to their more compact "iMac" line (intended for home use) and the "eMac" line (for the education markets). They were usually equipped with Apple's newest technologies, and commanded the highest prices among Apple desktop models. Some Power Mac G4 and G5 models were offered indual-processor configurations.
Prior to thePower Mac name change, certainPower Macintosh models were otherwise identical to their lower-cost re-branded siblings sold as theMacintosh LC andMacintosh Performa, as well as the dedicatedApple Workgroup Server andMacintosh Server G3 & G4 lines. Other past Macintosh lines which used PowerPC processors include thePowerBook 5300 and later models,iMac,iBook andXserve as well as theApple Network Server, which was technically not a Macintosh.
Apple positioned the Power Macintosh as a high-end personal computer aimed at businesses and creative professionals with anadvertising campaign consisting of severaltelevision commercials and print ads. The television commercials used the slogan "The Future Is Better Than You Expected", featuring the first three Power Macintosh computers to showcase special features such asnetworking andMS-DOS compatibility.
In 1993 and 1994, a television advertising campaign created byBBDO aired with the slogan "It does more, it costs less, it's that simple."
| Timeline of Power Macintosh, Pro, and Studio models |
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 See also:List of Mac models |
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