The Power Macintosh 5260 is a

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

designed, manufactured and sold by

Apple Computer, Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

from April 1996 to March 1997. It is a replacement for the

Power Macintosh 5200 LC The Power Macintosh 5200 LC and Power Macintosh 5300 LC were a line of personal computers that are a part of Apple Computer's Power Macintosh, LC, and Performa families of Macintosh computers. When sold to the consumer market, the machines ...

, retaining its all-in-one form factor while replacing its

PowerPC 603 The PowerPC 600 family was the first family of PowerPC processors built. They were designed at the Somerset facility in Austin, Texas, jointly funded and staffed by engineers from IBM and Motorola as a part of the AIM alliance. Somerset was opened ...

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

with the newer and faster PowerPC 603e, and dropping the "LC" brand. As was standard practice at the time for Apple, the 5260 was re-branded as a number of

Performa The Macintosh Performa is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Inc., Apple Computer, Inc. from 1992 to 1997. The Performa brand re-used models from Apple's Macintosh Quadra, Quadra, Macintosh Centris, Centri ...

models and sold to consumer markets, while the 5260 itself was primarily sold to the North American education market as a

Power Macintosh The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by ''MacWorld'' as "the most important te ...

. The

Power Macintosh 5400 The Power Macintosh 5400 (also sold under variations of the name Performa 5400) is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from April 1996 to March 1998. The 5400 is an all-in-one computer with an integrated moni ...

, also an all-in-one model, was introduced at the same time but had a significantly different logic board that retired

NuBus NuBus (pron. 'New Bus') is a 32-bit parallel computer bus, originally developed at MIT and standardized in 1987 as a part of the NuMachine workstation project. The first complete implementation of the NuBus was done by Western Digital for th ...

support in favour of

PCI PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Pro ...

. The 5260 was discontinued when the

Power Macintosh 5500 The Power Macintosh 5500 is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from February 1997 to March 1998. Like the Power Macintosh 5260 and 5400 that preceded it, the 5500 is an all-in-one design, built around a Po ...

was introduced in early 1997.

Hardware

The 5260 has an LC-style

Processor Direct Slot A processor direct slot (PDS) is a slot incorporated into many older Macintosh models that allowed direct access to the signal pins of a CPU, similar to the functionality of a local bus in PCs. This would result in much higher speeds than having ...

, and a slot into which an L2 cache card can be added.

Models

Common to all models are a 14" Shadow Mask RGB display at 640x480 at 16 bit, a single LC PDS slot, 2 RAM slots, and 1 MB of VRAM that cannot be upgraded. There are two serial ports on the back, but they do not support hardware handshaking, precluding the use of an external modem with speeds above 9600 bit/s. Introduced April 15, 1996: *Power Macintosh 5260/100: North American education model with 100 MHz CPU, 8 or 16 MiB of RAM, and an 800 MB hard disk *Macintosh Performa 5260CD: The Power Macintosh 5260/100, also available with the smaller 800 MB hard disk *Macintosh Performa 5270CD: Identical to the Performa 5260CD, but only sold in Europe and Asia. Introduced October 1, 1996: *Power Macintosh 5260/120: Later North American education model with 120 MHz CPU, 16 MiB of RAM and a 1.2 GB hard disk *Macintosh Performa 5260/120: Consumer version of 5260/120, only sold in Canada and Australia. Introduced November 12, 1996: *Macintosh Performa 5280: Consumer version of 5260/120, only sold in Japan.

Timelines

References

External links

Power Macintosh 5260/100
an

at everymac.com {{Apple hardware before 1998 5260 Macintosh Performa 5260 Macintosh all-in-ones Computer-related introductions in 1996