Having opened up the Macintosh to the 'clone' market (in an attempt to emulate/combat the now 'all powerful' IBM PC), Apple found itself with something of a problem - they were now being undercut and forced out of their own market. The answer came in the form of the PowerMac 4400.

The 4400 came in two varieties, with the first running at 160MHz and the later being upgraded to 200MHz (although there was also a version with a 166MHz DOS Card fitted). There were also other changes and the 200MHz version pushed the memory ceiling from 96Mb all the way up to 160Mb, doubled the onboard video memory (but still retained the accelerated ATI graphics sub-system), added onboard ethernet, and increased the standard hard drive from 1.2Gb to 2Gb. Between the two machines the differences were relatively minor but the differences between the 4400 range and the rest of the PowerMacs were far more obvious.

Apple had stuck with the Motorola 603e processor but used it with the 'Tanzania' motherboard which had been co-designed with Motorola (who used the same board on their Starmax series of Mac clones). For the Mac purist worse was yet to come though. The 4400 used 3.3 volt unbuffered EDO RAM which was rife in the PC world but unheard of in Mac circles. The three RAM slots though did offer excellent expandability and, coupled with the three PCI slots (on the 160MHz version - the 200MHz version had two PCI slots and a Comm II slot), allowed the 4400 to be a very flexible and upgradeable platform.

The ubiquitous SCSI drives that had been the stalwart of the Macintosh ever since the Mac Plus gave way to a complete Extended IDE mechanism. Cheaper IDE hard drives and CD-ROM drives had crept in as the PowerMac line was revised, and the 4400 used both - there was a SCSI connection but it was for external devices only and used the good old 25 pin socket (it also, like all IDE equipped Macs, didn't provide SCSI termination - the chain had to be terminated by the attached device(s)).

The 4400 could be seen as an attempt by Apple to stem the market dominance of the IBM PC by trying to play it at its own game (i.e. allowing other manufacturers to produce Macintosh machines but still keep producing machines of its own). As a low budget, high power machine the 4400 needed to cut costs and Apple did this not by using sub-standard technology or hardware (as had been the case with several machines in the past) but by removing unnecessary 'extras' (e.g. software) and using more off the shelf components. This resulted in a powerful machine that was ideal for the experienced or upgrading Macintosh user. For the first time buyer though the 4400 lacked any sort of extras or software (it shipped with system software only) and could be thought of as something of a poor choice.

Note: The 160MHz and 200MHz models both shipped with three memory slots but while they offered different memory ceilings both required that slot 1 used single bank DIMMs. The 160MHz machine could accept 8Mb, 16Mb and 32Mb modules while the 200MHZ machine would also allow 64Mb modules to be fitted in slots 2 and 3.

Like so many of my machines I came by a 4400 purely because of the way that it looked. After all of the identical 6X00 machines, the 4400 at least looked a bit different - it was also a bargain price (£11). I landed a 200MHz machine and this is a powerhouse of a machine (certainly compared to the 68K wonders that I'd been playing with). This thing nearly eclipses my G3 iMac and certainly tears along, even with OS 8.6 installed.

To look at the 4400 is not exactly a work of art and its boxy metal case is far more in the PC world than in the Mac world. It does have the little brightly coloured logo on the front though and, at the end of the day, that's what counts. Out of the box and it booted first time and a look under the hood revealed something of a chamber of horrors. Gone were the elegant designs of the past in instead we had a sprawling mass of IDE cables, PSU cables, and PCI riser cards - welcome to PC city.

While I've complained mightily about the IIvi and IIvx for their metal case construction, the 4400 is far, far worse and anyone who has delved inside a PC would be very much in their element. Instead of elegance and simplicity there's a mass of cables to be unplugged (including power light cables, motherboard power supply cables (4 of them)...). It's not a happy place for the Mac lover.

It was all stripped down though, thoroughly cleaned (including accidentally dropping the motherboard into a sink full of water - no damage done though) and put back together, but then nothing. No chime, no whirring fan...nothing. So back it all came apart and the delightful task of trying to find the problem by plugging and unplugging components started, and all to no avail. Had the machine binged its last bong? Of course not, and spying a CUDA switch (just as on my G3 iMac) saw a reset of the hardware and an immediate restoration of life - phew.

Technology wise the 4400 isn't wonderful but as a machine to use it's fantastic! The speed is excellent and getting hold of parts is certainly easier than finding 'Mac' parts (Ok so I can't transplant parts from other Macs but there's a handy PC repair shop around the corner...). It's fast, will run just about everything pre-OS X and is certainly a machine with many years of life left in it.