Power Macintosh 9500

The Power Macintosh 9500 was the high-end Power Macintosh model (and the first PCI-based Power Mac) when it debuted in the June 1995. In fact, it preceded the 7500 and 8500 by two months! The 9500 incorporated a single PowerPC 604e processor, or two PowerPC 604e processors, on a single daughter card that fit into a slot on the motherboard.

The Power Macintosh 9500 was designed for DTP or color publishing instead of audiovisual multimedia production. (In fact, it came with no RCA-style audio jacks or video input/output jacks; the Apple Accelerated Graphics Card or a third-party graphics card had to be purchased before this Mac could even be hooked up to a monitor at all.

The 9500 offers speed -- and plenty of it. It also came with a lot of options for expansion. With up to 6 PCI slots and support for up to 768 MB of RAM, the Power Macintosh 9500 had every sign of a high-end Macintosh powerhouse.

The Power Macintosh 9500 was also the first-ever multiprocessor Mac. Throughout the 1990s, Apple kept on offering and discontinuing multiprocessor Macs prior to them becoming near-standard with the introduction of the Power Macintosh G4 and Power Macintosh G5 computers, and completely standard with the introduction of Intel Core Duo Macintosh computers.