Growing Commitment by PCI Developers for Power Macintosh with PCI

CUPERTINO, California--April 13, 1995--Underscoring the already impressive list of developers committed to PCI-based Power Macintosh development, support from the developer community continues to grow as Apple gears up towards the release of its Power Mac systems with PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect), which are expected to be introduced this summer. These industry- leading developers design and manufacture PCI cards which support virtually all major solution areas where peripherals are used: digital video production, communications, client/server computing, enterprise computing, data acquisition and networking. The PCI cards from these vendors are intended to support a full range of peripherals including SCSI devices, mass storage and tape back-up products, printers, scanners, processor accelerators and NuBus expansion chassis.

A noteworthy array of new PCI developers who have committed to the Power Macintosh platform include: Creative Solutions Inc., Dai Nippon Screen Manufacturing Company, Ltd., Distributed Processing Technology, Electronic Imaging Systems, Inc., InnoSys Incorporated, Matrox Graphics Inc., Micronet Technology, National Instruments, Precision Digital Images, Rockwell Network Systems, Spectra Systems, Truevision, and Yarc Systems Corporation.

PCI Developers who originally announced their support of the Power Macintosh platform last November include: 4-Sight LC, Adaptec, Inc., Asante Technologies, Inc., ATI Technologies, Inc., ATTO Technology, Inc., Avid Technology, Inc., DCA, Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., Digital Equipment Corporation, Farallon Computing, FAST Multimedia AG, FWB Inc., Harlequin Limited, Hermstedt GmbH, Intelligent Resources Integrated Systems, Linotype-Hell AG, Neutral Ltd., QLogic Corp., Radius, Inc., and Second Wave, Inc.

Developers who have recently announced or are today expected to announce PCI products for Power Macintosh include:

"We are experiencing phenomenal support from the PCI developer community for the Power Macintosh platform," said Howard Lee, senior vice president of Apple's Macintosh Systems Division. "It's a win-win situation for both customers and developers. Customers will be able to choose from an increasingly wide variety of industry standard PCI cards to use in their Power Macintosh systems while developers may benefit from incremental business and revenue opportunities by offering PCI products for the Macintosh market."

As part of its continuing strategy to provide easy-to-use and cost-effective networking solutions, Apple is developing its own line of network interface cards for the PCI bus. The first cards to ship are planned to be a 100BaseTX Fast Ethernet Card and a Token Ring card, available with the first PCI-based Power Macintosh systems. "We plan to price the cards aggressively as we intend to use the transition to PCI to grow our lead in the Macintosh networking market," said Bill Brown, manager of Apple's Connectivity Products.

Power Macintosh Fits In with PCI Industry Standard

By developing more open PowerPC-based Power Macintosh systems with industry standard interfaces such as the PCI bus, Apple is furthering its commitment to easily fit into a full range of computing environments. Apple's PCI implementation is expected to be completely compatible with the PCI 2.0 specification, thus allowing any 2.0-compliant PCI card with the appropriate software driver to work in PCI-based Power Macintosh systems.

Power Macintosh Stands Out with New Solutions

New solutions for the Power Macintosh platform--made possible by the integration of PCI technology with Power Mac's RISC-based performance--are also anticipated to be developed in the areas of video conferencing and video authoring. In these areas, PCI cards for MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) facilitate full motion video on the screen by compressing video images. High-speed networking such as ATM (Asynchronous Transmission Mode) and FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) is another emerging solution which PCI cards are expected to address. The support for Power Macintosh from PCI developers potentially broadens the availability of peripheral cards for Macintosh customers since many PCI cards being developed for x86-based PCI computers are being designed by vendors to work in Power Macintosh systems.

Power Macintosh Momentum Surges Forward

Today's announcement of growing developer support fuels the continuing momentum behind the RISC-based Power Macintosh platform. Since its introduction in mid-March 1994 through the end of December, well over one million Power Macintosh systems have shipped, two months prior to the goal of shipping one million Power Macintosh systems during the first 12 months. Support from software developers also continues to be strong with over 600 native Power Mac applications now shipping with new titles entering the market each week.

Apple Computer, Inc., a recognized pioneer and innovator in the information industry, creates powerful solutions based on easy-to- use personal computers, servers, peripherals, software, online services, and personal digital assistants. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) develops, manufactures, licenses and markets products, technologies and services for the business, education, consumer, scientific & engineering and government markets in over 140 countries.

Apple, the Apple logo, and Macintosh are registered trademarks and Power Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. PowerPC is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, used under license therefrom. All other brand names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and are hereby acknowledged.