Each week Doctor Happy Mac will take you back in time to look at a Mac from Apples illustrious history. There are plenty to choose from, some great, some insanely great and some, well, maybe less than great. Each Mac scores out of five on the DHM "how many points out of five do I give it" system. Accredited by the boffins at Strasbourg University Department of Accreditation (probably) as the most accurate measure of computer performance yet devised (probably).
This week: Performa 6400
- Available Feb August 1996 until August 1997
- Came with System 7.5
- Internal CD Drive floppy and Zip drive
- Maximum RAM 136MB
- Integral Bass speaker
The Performa 6400 was a very different Mac. It was the only Performa (home range of Macs at the time) available in a tower case and had a smooth modern design for thime that was unusually pleasing on the eye. The tower design allowed Apple to fit a CD drive, a floppy drive AND a zip drive, however other expansion (memory etc) was limited and the case was a bit hard to open up.
The machine featured an integral Bass sub woofer which gave it a great sound, in fact it still sounds better than any other mac ever made.
No great speed demon the 6400 was available in 180 or 200 MHz forms and used a 603e chip. It gave adequate home performance and often showed up in small offices.
DHM gives the 6400 3 out of 5.
The 6400 has a small but devotred following of users that love it's quirky charms, it can even be persuaded to run OS X with the addition of a G3 processor upgrade card!!
Essentially valueless on ebay.
