System 7.1P3

System 7.1P3 was released in October 1993 for the Macintosh Performa 410 and 460, which initiated a temporary "Performa system software" era. Despite the differences (and the apparent dual-track system), "normal" Macs were perfectly able to run Performa system software, and vice-versa, although Apple refused to deal with any users that installed or ran the wrong system software.

The performa system softwares used a progress bar during startup.

The most significant changes came in the Launcher control panel for Performas, which not only featured the "regular" Launcher, but also added in features that saved all documents to the Documents folder, and hid the desktop and desktop icons while another application was being run. These were eventually relocated to the Performa control panel. The General Controls control panel replaced a user-customizable desktop-pattern system where the desktop could be customized by painting dots of different colours; instead, a dozen patterns (mostly in colour) were made available, in the form of a pop-up menu.

Additionally, the About This Macintosh... menu item under the Apple menu was altered to read "About This Computer", which also resulted in stripping the specific model information.

For colour Performas, colour support was fully maximized by making the default setting 256 colours instead of black-and-white.