The Power Macintosh 9500 (sold as Power Macintosh 9515 in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

and

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an area ...

) 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 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 June 1995 to February 1997. It is powered by a

PowerPC 604 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 ...

processor, a second-generation

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

chip which is faster than the

PowerPC 601 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 ...

chip used in the

Power Macintosh 8100 The Power Macintosh 8100 (also sold in Japan as the Power Macintosh 8115 and with bundled server software as the Workgroup Server 8150) is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Power Macintosh series of Macintosh computers. I ...

. The 180MP and models, introduced August 1996, use the enhanced

PowerPC 604e 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 ...

processor. ''MacWorld'' Magazine gave the 9500 a positive review, concluding that it is "not the second-generation Power Mac for the rest of us — it's too pricey .... but it is an excellent foundation for a high-end graphics workstation — for color publishing or media production. Its speed and expandability should also made it popular in the scientific and technical markets." Their benchmarks showed that the 9500 outperformed the Quadra 950 when running older Mac software in the

Mac 68k emulator The Mac 68k emulator is a software emulator built into all versions of the classic Mac OS for PowerPC. This emulator enabled running applications and system code that were originally written for the 680x0-based Macintosh models. With a few exceptio ...

, posting speeds almost twice as fast as the

Quadra 900 The Macintosh Quadra 900 is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from October 1991 to May 1992. It was introduced alongside the Quadra 700 as the first computers in the Quadra family of Macintosh computers usi ...

. The 9500 was replaced by the

Power Macintosh 9600 The Power Macintosh 9600 (also sold with additional server software as the Apple Workgroup Server 9650) is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Power Macintosh series of Macintosh computers. It was introduced in February 199 ...

Hardware

The 9500 includes several technological firsts for Apple. The CPU is connected via a

daughterboard In computing, an expansion card (also called an expansion board, adapter card, peripheral card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus slo ...

, and so can be swapped easily. Available were single-processor cards ranging from 120 to 200 MHz, and a dual processor card with two 180 MHz CPUs. This is also the first Macintosh to use the

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 ...

standard, with six PCI slots available -- one of which must be used for a

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

. Infoworld's Anita Epler noted that "Because most multimedia developers don't use the onboard video found on previous Mac models, Apple wisely economized by simply leaving it out. Users can purchase their own PCI graphics card or opt for Apple's 64-bit accelerated PCI video board with 2 MB of VRAM as an optional accessory." The 9500 is also the first computer from Apple to support 168-pin

DIMM A DIMM () (Dual In-line Memory Module), commonly called a RAM stick, comprises a series of dynamic random-access memory integrated circuits. These memory modules are mounted on a printed circuit board and designed for use in personal compute ...

memory modules, and the 512 KB of on-board 128-bit-wide cache utilizes copy-back instead of write-through, offering faster speeds than prior Macintosh models, as well as the ability to install single modules. The logic board has a total of 12 memory slots; like the

, installing memory requires removing the logic board from the case. When it was introduced, 64 MB DIMMs were the largest available on the market, making for a maximum memory limit of 768 MB. Companies like Advantage Memory were selling DIMMs of this size for $3,900 USD each. 128 MB DIMMs were introduced later in 1995, offering a theoretical limit of 1.5 GB memory, though System 7.5.2 is unable to use more than 1 GB of memory. Some other firsts for a Macintosh include a regular 10BASE-T ethernet port alongside the

AAUI Apple Attachment Unit Interface (AAUI) is a mechanical re-design by Apple of the standard Attachment Unit Interface (AUI) used to connect Ethernet transceivers to computer equipment. AUI was popular in the era before the dominance of 10BASE-T n ...

port, as well as support for the new SCSI-2 Fast standard, and a 4X CD-ROM. The basic design of the

logic board A motherboard (also called mainboard, main circuit board, mb, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, logic board (only in Apple computers) or mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expan ...

, called "Tsunami", was used by various

Macintosh clone A Macintosh clone, also known as a Clonintosh (a portmanteau of "Clone (computing), Clone" and "Macintosh"), is a computer running the Mac OS operating system that was not produced by Apple Inc. The earliest Mac clones were based on Macintosh clon ...

makers as a reference design and a modified version was used in the non-Macintosh

Apple Network Server The Apple Network Server (ANS) was a line of PowerPC-based server computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from February 1996 to April 1997. It was codenamed "Shiner" and originally consisted of two models, the Network S ...

series. Utilizing a third-party G4 CPU upgrade and the

XPostFacto {{Rewrite, date=June 2022 XPostFacto is an open source utility that enables the installation of PowerPC versions of Mac OS X up to Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger), and Darwin on some PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh systems that are not officially supporte ...

installation utility it is possible to run up to

Mac OS X v10.5 Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X Tig ...

"Leopard" on a 9500, making it the oldest model capable of running Mac OS X.

Models

Included as standard with all models are 16 MB RAM, 1 GB HDD, and AppleCD 600i 4x CD-ROM. Introduced June 19, 1995: * Power Macintosh 9500/120 * Power Macintosh 9500/132: 132 MHz CPU, 2 GB HDD. Introduced October 2, 1995: * Power Macintosh 9515/132: Same as the 9500/132, sold in Europe and Asia. Introduced April 22, 1996: * Power Macintosh 9500/150: 150 MHz CPU, 16 or 32 MB RAM, 2 GB HDD. Introduced August 7, 1996: * Power Macintosh 9500/180MP: Two 180 MHz

CPUs, 16 or 32 MB RAM, 2 GB HDD, AppleCD 1200i 8x CD-ROM. * Power Macintosh 9500/200: 16 or 32 MB RAM, 2 GB HDD, AppleCD 1200i 8x CD-ROM.

Timeline

References

External links

Low End Mac's Power Macintosh 9500 page
{{Apple hardware before 1998 9500 9500 Macintosh towers Computer-related introductions in 1995