In November 1996, Apple released the Power Macintosh 4400 with a starting price of $1,725. Also sold as the Power Macintosh 7220, it’d be easy to write this machine off as just another grain of sand on the beige beach that was Apple’s product line in the 1990s. I mean, just look at this thing, pictured here with an Apple-branded CRT:
If you were around the Mac line in the late 1990s, your blood probably ran cold when you saw the 4400’s name in the above headline.
The 4400 was introduced as an inexpensive “small business” computer. As a way to cut costs, Apple did everything it could to bring its manufacturing costs down. Instead of using a pre-existing enclosure, as was the company’s go-to move, it used something much worse.
We looked at a pre-release version of the 4400 and found it to be a strange bird, indeed. Strange, that is, in the Apple brood; when compared with PCs it fits right in with the flock. It is contained in a stock desktop PC case fitted with Apple’s distinctive curved nose piece. The back (featuring one each of SCSI, modem, printer, ADB, microphone, sound-out, RJ-45 Ethernet and monitor ports) is industrial-looking, while bent sheet metal fills the case’s insides, sharp edges and all. The IDE drive sits on end, while the Comm II slot (occupied with an Ethernet card) and two PCI slots reside in a riser card. For the first time, Apple has abandoned automatic switching in the power supply, a small cost savings at the expense of international users’ convenience.
Mac users were used to a certain level of fit and finish that this model lacked. The 4400 felt cheap, and with the floppy drive on the left side, it looked almost alien to the Mac faithful. Even worse, it lacked the auto-inject feature found on other Mac models.
In 2009, Macworld put the 4400 on a list titled “Six Worst Apple Products of All Time,” reflecting on the case design. Here’s Adam Engst:
The Power Macintosh 4400 was Apple’s feeble attempt at a cheap Mac knockoff. It had a sharp-edged metal case and more industry-standard components than other Macs, and it was horrible. It crashed all the time, had a particularly loud fan, and (oddly) had its floppy drive on the left side-convenient for maybe 10 percent of the population.
While the outside was undoubtedly terrible, Apple also cut corners inside the machine. The 4400 was built around the “Tanzania” motherboard design, which was used in numerous Mac clones of the era. The board supported the PowerPC 603e processor and up to 160 MB of RAM, but it came with some odd features, as Eric Schwarz wrote about in 2005:
The motherboard … only had one EIDE bus, so you could only have the CD-ROM drive and the hard drive internally, despite the power supply’s extra strength. Other clones, such as the Motorola StarMax, also used a similar motherboard (the Tanzania architecture), but added things such as PS/2 ports or VGA.
Seeing PS/2 ports on the back of a Mac is next-level weird, so we can be thankful Apple didn’t include them on the 4400. The IDE bus meant that drives were slower than those in SCSI-equipped Macs.
The 4400 could run System 7.5.3 through Mac OS 9.1, but even there, there is fine print to pay attention to, as System 7.5.5 wouldn’t boot on this machine. In 1998, Apple released an update for Mac OS 8.1 to patch issues associated with the Tanzania design:
The Power Macintosh 4400 Update contains two patches for Mac OS 8.1. The first patch corrects a memory corruption problem caused by Mac OS Extended (HFS+) that results in systems that will not boot after being upgraded to Mac OS 8.1. The symptom is a hang during startup (for example, when the Happy Mac icon appears, or when the “Welcome to Mac OS” screen appears, or while the extensions are loading). This problem can occur even if there are no Mac OS Extended volumes in use.
The second patch corrects an obscure problem with the ATA Manager. The symptom is what appears to be a hung system — the mouse pointer will move but the system does not respond (it is in an infinite loop). If you are using a PC Compatibility Card, you will not be able to switch back to the Mac OS environment. This update also corrects this problem. This update modifies the system file to correct the Mac OS Extended problem and installs the “4400 ATA INIT” extension to correct the ATA Manager problem.
When the update is installed, the system version in the “About This Computer” window will be listed as “Mac OS 8.1” and “System Enabler 4400 Update”.
Some folks have gotten Mac OS X to run on the 4400, but I can’t imagine how slow that must be, even with hardware changes like drop-in CPU upgrades, a faster GPU, and even swapping the hard drive for something like a CF or SD card.
Apple would eventually ship a few different models of the 4400, including the original 4400/160 and the slightly faster 4400/200. The latter could be equippedwith an optional 166 MHz DOS card containing 16 MB of RAM and a Cyrix 6×86processor.
The Power Mac 4400 was discontinued in February 1998 after the Power Mac G3 desktop hit the market. Time has not been kind to this machine, and I think this headline from r/VintageApple sums it up nicely:
Acquired a Power Macintosh 4400/200 today. What in the Gateway 2000 is this thing?
This article originally appeared as a column in the newsletter for 512 Pixels members.