Macintosh History: 1996
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After 12 years making Macs using the Motorola 680x0 family of processors (and one year with the Lisa before that), Apple discontinued that last 680x0-based Mac in 1996, marking the end of an era.
It's the OS
The most significant news of the year revolved around the Mac OS, not hardware. In August, Apple announced the end of the Copland project, which was the code name for System 8.
In August, the last update to System 7.5 was released, 7.5.5.
After months of courting Be about acquiring BeOS, their powerful operating systems optimized for the PowerPC, Apple surprised everyone by purchasing NeXT in December. The goal was to use the NeXT OS as a core for System 8.
The project, eventually named Rhapsody, bore some fruit in 1999 with the release of Mac OS X Server. The "consumer" version of Mac OS X should be available in mid-2000 and will ship on all Apple hardware in January 2001.
Power Macs
Sure, the Power Macs got faster, but 1996 saw no revolutionary jumps, just evolutionary improvements.
On the consumer front, the Power Mac 6300/120 came out in April with a
120 MHz 603e CPU. This Road
Apple was replaced by the 6300/160, which has a whole new motherboard
architecture, in October.
The Power Mac 7500 was replaced with the 7600, which used the more powerful 604e processor. It started at 120 MHz in April, then moved to 132 MHz in August.
The 8500 moved from 120 MHz to 150 MHz in April and 180 MHz in August. The 9500 went from 132 MHz to 150 MHz in April. In August, it was available in a dual-processor 180 MHz configuration or with a 200 MHz CPU.
Apple's attempt to take on the clones, the pedestrian Power Mac 4400, was introduced in November with a 160 MHz 603e processor.
Personal Perspective
Except for the death of Copland and purchase of NeXT, 1996
simply wasn't a very exciting year - and set the stage for the
beleaguered year. 
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