Power Macintosh 6100

On March 14, 1994 Apple bet the company on a new processor architecture, and the 6100 is where it started. The PowerPC 601 ran at 60 or 66MHz, designed by Apple, IBM and Motorola together, and it was a RISC chip replacing a CISC one, which meant every piece of Mac software in existence had been compiled for the wrong instruction set. Apple solved that with emulation. System 7.1.2 shipped with a 68k emulator that ran existing applications without recompiling, slower than native but acceptably so, and that is the whole reason the transition worked. Software rebuilt for PowerPC, early Photoshop among it, ran startlingly fast and showed people what they were buying. The 6100 was the cheap one, in a low pizza-box case aimed at homes, small businesses and the curious. Reviewers liked the native benchmarks, then pointed out that most users would spend most of their time in emulation, where the gains were a great deal more modest. Against Intel's year-old Pentium the 601 held up, and Apple put that in the advertising. The case felt cheap next to a Quadra, NuBus was already dated, and some configurations still used caddy CD-ROM drives. None of that is why it matters. Apple changed processor architectures without stranding its software, which plenty of people had said could not be done, and the company ran the same playbook again for Intel in 2006 and Apple Silicon in 2020.