Fri, 5:30 p.m. · Hardware · Apple users have always called the computer “Mac”, but the official name was “Macintosh” until 1999. For this reason, the long form “Power Macintosh” was emblazoned on the first Apple computer equipped with PowerPC processors; it was only five years later that the product name was adapted to what everyone was saying anyway. It has been exactly 30 years since a major architectural change was due, as Apple brought the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100 and 8100 models onto the market in March 1994.
The latter variant was a tower with an initial clock speed of up to 80 MHz and thus represented the top performance of the still very young PowerPC range. The variant with 8 MB RAM and a GB hard drive cost $6,200 – adjusted for inflation, this corresponds to around $13,000 . If, on the other hand, it were the cheapest model, a Power Macintosh 6100 with 8 MB RAM and 160 MB hard drive, you could find it starting at $1,800, or around $3,900 adjusted for inflation.
Sales success – with a lot of performance
The sales figures may sound ridiculous from today’s perspective, but 150,000 copies sold within just two weeks in March 1994 were sensationally high. In order to be able to run older programs on the 68k platform, there was an integrated emulator – in a sense, the ancestor of Rosetta for the Intel and ARM transition. The built-in PowerPC 601 processor provided so much power that users often didn’t notice anything about the emulation. Incidentally, those chips were manufactured in the then very advanced 600 nm design; today TSMC has reached 2 nm production.
Platform until 2006
Apple remained loyal to the PowerPC until the introduction of the Intel Macs, which gradually replaced all PPC models since January 2006. In the last few years before the Intel switch, Apple had various problems with the CPU manufacturers. First Motorola, after initial successes, failed to offer competitively fast and higher clocked processors, then IBM failed to bring a mobile G5 onto the market that was suitable for use in PowerBooks. Especially with the G4, faster architectures were primarily on paper and not in practice.
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