Power Mac G4 Graphite

Power Mac G4

The "Graphite" Power Mac G4
Developer	Apple Inc.
Type	Mini Tower
Release date	August 31, 1999
Discontinued	June 20, 2004
CPU	single or dual PowerPC G4, 350 MHz – 1.42 GHz (Up to 2 GHz processors through 3rd-party.)
Predecessor	Power Macintosh G3
Successor	Power Mac G5

The Power Mac G4 is a series of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1999 to 2004 as part of the Power Macintosh line. Built around the PowerPC G4 series of microprocessors, the Power Mac G4 was marketed by Apple as the first "personal supercomputers", reaching speeds of 4 to 20 gigaFLOPS. This was the first existing Macintosh product to be officially shortened as "Mac", and is the last Mac able to boot into classic Mac OS.

The enclosure style introduced with the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue and White) was retained through its entire five year production run of the Power Mac G4, albeit with significant changes to match Apple's evolving industrial design and to accommodate increasing cooling needs. The G4 and the enclosure were retired with the introduction of the Power Mac G5.

The original Power Mac G4 was introduced at the Seybold conference in San Francisco on August 31, 1999.. There were two variants, officially titled Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) with 400 MHz, 450 MHz and 500 MHz configurations available, and Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics), with 350 MHz and 400 MHz configurations. Colloquially, this generation of Power Mac is referred to as "Graphite", owing to the colors of the case being similar to the iMac G3 Graphite.

Apple originally planned to ship the 500 MHz configuration in October 1999, but they were forced to postpone this because of poor yield of the CPUs. In response, Apple reduced the clock speed of the processor in each configuration by 50 MHz (making the options 350 MHz, 400 MHz and 450 MHz), which caused some controversy because they did not lower the original prices.

The early 400 MHz (later 350 MHz) PCI-based version used a motherboard identical to the one used in Power Macintosh G3 (Blue and White) computers including the use of Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) processors sockets (minus the ADB port), in a "graphite" colored case and with the new Motorola PowerPC 7400 (G4) CPU. The higher-speed models, code name "Sawtooth", used a greatly modified motherboard design with AGP 2x graphics (replacing the 66 MHz PCI slot).