Power Macintosh 7500

The 7500's best feature was a socket. Apple put the processor on a removable daughtercard rather than soldering it to the logic board, so a machine bought in 1995 with a 100MHz PowerPC 601 could later take a 604, and eventually a third-party G3 card. That is why 7500s were still in service years after their original silicon had become embarrassing. A small industry grew up selling upgrade cards for them, and Mac tinkerers treated the machine as a platform rather than a purchase. It shipped August 28, 1995 with three PCI slots, Mac OS 7.5.2, and a low desktop case with a flip-down front door that Apple reused across the 7200, 7300 and the beige G3 minitowers. Against the 9500 it gave up three slots and a lot of money. Against a 1995 Pentium the 601 was already looking slow, which reviewers noted before pointing out that this was the one Mac where that mattered least. Schools and small businesses bought them. So did tinkerers. It never had the 8500's video glamour or the 9500's horsepower, and it outlasted both in daily use.