Power Macintosh 7100

Background

The Power Macintosh 7100 was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from March 1994 to January 1996. It is the mid-range machine of the first generation of Power Macintosh line, between the Power Macintosh 6100 and the 8100. The 7100 re-used the Macintosh IIvx case with few changes. The initial version of the 7100 was powered by a 66 MHz PowerPC 601, and an 80 MHz version replaced it in January 1995. The 7100 was succeeded in August 1995 by two new models, the Power Macintosh 7200 and the Power Macintosh 7500, though sales of the 7100 continued into early 1996. The 7100AV variants include a 2 MB VRAM card with S-Video in/out. Apple did not release a "DOS Compatible" card for the 7100 as they had for some contemporary Macintosh Quadra models, opting instead to offer the 7100 bundled with the SoftWindows emulator at a price of $385 U.S. With an optional 256KB L2 cache card installed, Macworld Magazine determined that the performance is comparable to 25 MHz Intel 80486SX.