Macintosh Quadra 800

The Quadra 800 shipped February 10, 1993 and is the one people still name as the best 68040 Mac Apple built. A 68040 at 33MHz. The speed came from more than the clock, because Apple had redesigned the system architecture around it and given it a faster SCSI implementation, which is why the 800 beat earlier Quadras that looked comparable on paper. The case was new and much smaller than the Quadra 900 and 950 towers, with dual SCSI buses, Ethernet on the board and room for up to 136MB of RAM. Publishers, video editors and audio people took to it immediately, since it gave them most of a Quadra 900 in something that fitted beside a desk and cost considerably less. Reviewers made the price-to-performance argument in every writeup and called it the smart buy. Against PC workstations it held up well in publishing and multimedia, where QuarkXPress, Photoshop and the early digital audio tools all ran on the Mac first. The compact case made internal work fiddlier than the big towers, and NuBus was starting to look slow as video capture demanded more bandwidth. Apple's Quadra naming had become genuinely confusing by this point too. It sold well regardless. PowerPC made the entire 68k line legacy hardware about a year later.