A Toast to the PowerMac 4400

 The PowerMac 4400 is probably one of the most hated Macs of all time. It wasn't really all that bad (merely Compromised, but it was a very non-Mac, style Mac which used a cheap PC case and had the floppy disk and CD drive the wrong way round). It's the Register's third most awful Mac:

“The Power Macintosh 4400 of November 1996 is widely regarded as one of - if not the - least distinguished Macs of all time. The best thing you could say about it was that it worked.”

And I had one. And I liked it. So, a couple of weeks ago I was wondering how much I'd actually paid for that 'lemon de jour' (thanks ArsTechnica) and I couldn't find out. It's like, surely everything is there on the internet. Well,  that's not quite true, I could find out the price in USD, but I needed to find the price of the PowerMac 4400 in GBP, because that's what I paid for it. And, I tried, for a least an hour or two: looking at Everymac, and LowEndMac and then just searching for reviews, and then checking out every online back issue of MacUser (UK) and Macworld (UK) I could find all to no avail.

It's just not there. Until now! Ready?

The PowerMac 4400 cost £799 for a 160MHz machine with a 1.2GB HD; 16MB of RAM; 8x CD ROM (not CDRW or DVD, this was November 1996!) and no display.

Now you know. But to tell you truth, I really liked mine. Let me explain the back story.

BackStory

In late 1996, I'd started an MPhil in Computer Architecture at Manchester University. At the time, I'd had a Performa 400 (the first Macintosh I'd bought); and with it I'd added a Zip drive; extra RAM and HD and put it on the internet, which I'd then used to get in touch with Steve Furber (who invented the ARM processor) to be able to get an interview for the course I wanted to do.

But the Performa 400 was never going to be capable of handling an MPhil (in retrospect I think it might have); so I was quite keen on replacing it with a funky, new PowerPC Mac.

I was actually quite keen on an all-in-one Performa 5200/5300 as they were the cheapest and I was a student. In fact I'd used one to do my Manchester University application on, while house-sitting for a friend and was impressed, but 18 months later better ones were available.

I'd been most impressed by the Apus 2000 Mac clone, but no-one seemed to have any any, but then came across the 5260, which seemed to have a similar spec. I'd gone as far as placing an order for one; and then discovered that it could only handle a 640x480 display! I was appalled; and cancelled the order.

I was getting fairly desperate for a new Mac (my Performa 400 was a shocking 3.5 years old by then 😮  ), but when I opened the latest issue of MacUser, I saw that there was a review of the PowerMac 4400, which even when adding a monitor was cheaper, and better than the 5260.

And then in the same magazine I saw that they were on offer at a Mac dealer called Gordon Harwood, based in the backwoods of Alfreton, Derbyshire.

Weird, a decent, successful Mac dealer, not in a big city! And more importantly, on the way from Manchester to my parent's house.

So, I promptly rang them up; reserved one (they had them in stock); then went to my parents for the weekend and bought it, either on the way down, or on the way back. I added another 16MB of RAM (I believe, taking it up to 32MB); and a Sony 15" Triniton SX; along with a student discount.

In Use

And frankly, it was a great computer! It could do everything I could throw at it; including full-screen QuickTime videos. The 8x CD ROM felt really nippy compared with my PowerCD. The Hard disk did seem a little small, even then and I had to shove quite a lot of stuff onto my Zip drive. I bought Nisus Writer 6 to write my thesis on it, and Nisus Writer 6 was an absolute joy of a word-processor (I also had Clarisworks 3 for day-to-day office documents). I even had a version of SoftWindows so that I could run Turbo C++ 4.5 and the H8, IAR compiler I was using to continue my Heathrow Express and Midlands Metro firmware.

I did most of my development on Metrowerks CodeWarrior 10 Gold, a multi-target 68K / PowerPC 'C' compiler with a great Object-oriented application framework called PowerPlant.

Later I bought a PAL based PCI TV card that worked with that Mac. 

Stupidly I Sold It

Things all went wrong when my PowerBook 100 got stolen from the University. It had been quite handy to have a laptop as a sort of satellite computer and my main computer back at home and I'd bought the PowerBook 100 with a 30MB hard drive just a few months before I'd bought the PowerMac 4400 and already I couldn't imagine computing without a laptop.

But when it got stolen I had a dilemma, which basically revolved around moving to only a laptop or having both. For a while I used a PowerBook duo 230 from Steve Furber himself (he'd just upgraded), but it came with the full dock and it was impossible to sell just the dock for a mini-dock as people wanted both. But the full dock took up quite a bit of space. So, eventually I figured I should sell both the PowerMac 4400 and get a PowerBook, and because the 4400 was quite cheap, I ended up with a low-end PowerBook 5300 (black and white), but with a second monitor card.

It wasn't terribly reliable, the HD was small and then it started to fail in the spring of 2000.

So, in the end, I think it was a bit of a mistake going down that route. The PM4400 would have done a good job of running up to Mac OS 8.x and completing my thesis; while I could bided my time and then chosen a more suitable laptop (e.g. a Powerbook 150, because although bulky, it supported an IDE drive) or perhaps even waited until after my thesis.

Conclusion

I originally wanted to know how much the PowerMac 4400 cost, to help work out if I've been spending more or less on Macs over time, in particular my MacBook Pro. In reality it's been quite variable with the PM 4400 in the middle of the pack. It was one of those rare occasions where the internet didn't have the answers, so I had to hunt down the facts myself.