Power Macintosh 8500

The 8500 was the video Mac. A PowerPC 604 between 120 and 150MHz, with professional video input and output built into the machine, so you could digitize NTSC or PAL and record back to tape without buying a capture card. In 1995 that was close to unheard of. Non-linear editing on a PC meant buying expensive specialist hardware, and here it sat in the box with Apple's own software to drive it. Independent producers bought them immediately. Schools, television production houses and corporate video departments followed, and the 8500 built a reputation as the machine that made desktop video practical years before Final Cut existed. It shared the case and PCI architecture with the 7500 and 9500. What separated it was the AV hardware and a faster stock processor, and the 604 also beat Pentium desktop-video rigs on rendering and compression while costing considerably more than a mainstream PC tower. It had rough edges. The AV daughtercard circuitry could be temperamental, and drivers frustrated early adopters for a long time. This is where Apple's approach of building a distinct Power Mac tier for each kind of work paid off best.