Power Macintosh 7300

The 7300 was the last of the beige 604 towers, and the most sorted. February 17, 1997, a PowerPC 604e between 166 and 200MHz, Mac OS 7.6, three PCI slots. The 604e was the 604 with a bigger cache and some architectural tidying, and the difference showed up in ordinary work as well as in Photoshop filters and rendering, where PowerPC had always done well against Pentium and Pentium II machines. Nothing about it was exciting. That was the point. The 9500's launch had a logic-board recall and the 8500's AV hardware frustrated people for years, and the 7300 had neither problem. It arrived months before Apple's roadmap turned to the G3, which makes it the end of the 604 line. Because the processor sits on a card, owners could later fit a G3 upgrade and did, in large numbers, which kept these towers useful well past their expected life. Creative professionals, schools and prosumers bought it. Then Jobs came back and Apple's product line went from a dozen confusing towers to four boxes.