Power Macintosh
Described by Macworld as "the most important technical evolution of the Macintosh since the Mac II debuted in 1987",[1] it is the first computer with the PowerPC CPU architecture, the flagship product of the AIM alliance.
Gassée's preference, as it was with the upcoming Macintosh IIfx, was to create a product that would compete in the high-end workstation market, previously not an area of strength for Apple.
[4] Initially, Apple invested considerable time and effort in an attempt to create their own RISC CPU in a project code-named "Aquarius",[5] even to the point where a Cray-1 supercomputer was purchased to assist with designing the chip.
After Gassée left Apple in early 1990, the goal of the Jaguar project was refocused to be a mainstream Macintosh system instead of a new platform.
[13] 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.
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.
[16] 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 like DayStar Digital and Power Computing were also coming to the market at this time, undercutting Apple's prices.
The first generation of Power Macintoshes had shipped with NuBus, but by the end of 1993, it was becoming clear that Intel's PCI bus was going to be the widely adopted future of internal expansion.
[17] 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.
They also noted that the 8500 runs an average of 24 to 44 percent faster than a similarly clocked Intel Pentium chip, increasing to double on graphics and publishing tasks.
By the early 1990s, the networking industry was coalescing around the 10BASE-T connector, leading Apple to include this port alongside AAUI in mid-1995, starting with the Power Macintosh 9500.
For some years afterwards, a number of third parties created dongles that provided backwards compatibility to users of newer Power Mac systems with old hardware.
[21] Shortly after Steve Jobs' return to Apple in 1997, Jony Ive was appointed senior vice president of industrial design.
Building on the critical and commercial success of the iMac, 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 the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue and White), a machine that received considerable plaudits from reviewers, including PC Magazine's Technical Excellence Award for 1999.
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 the iMac.
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 its AltiVec instruction set by its own marketing name, "Velocity Engine".
[26] 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's Pentium 4, which featured significantly higher clock speeds than competing chips from Sun, IBM, and AMD, but without a corresponding performance benefit.
The company's public presentations – Stevenotes in particular – often featured lengthy segments pitting a high-powered Compaq or Dell computer against the Power Macintosh in a series of benchmarks and scripted tasks, usually in Adobe Photoshop.
[27] 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%.
The official end to the Power Macintosh line came at the 2006 Worldwide Developers Conference, where Phil Schiller introduced its replacement, the Mac Pro.
[38] 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.
The second generation also makes use of Open Firmware, allowing them to more easily boot alternate operating systems (including OS X via XPostFacto), though use of various hacks was still necessary.
The Centris 610 form factor is a low-profile "pizza-box" design with a height of 3.4 inches, intended to be placed on a desktop with a monitor on top.
The Power Macintosh 7500 form factor is a horizontally-oriented desktop design with a height of 6.15 inches, suitable for placing a monitor on top.
Apple positioned the Power Macintosh as a high-end personal computer aimed at businesses and creative professionals with an advertising campaign consisting of several television commercials and print ads.
