Before the first Power Mac G3s, Apple had planned a Power Mac 9700. And one can currently be found on eBay.
The Power Mac 9700 was intended to succeed the 9600 in the high-end market, featuring a G3 processor, as well as numerous memory slots (twelve) and expansion card slots (six PCI). The machine was abandoned upon Steve Jobs’ return, in favor of a less expandable Power Mac G3 (3 SDRAM slots, 3 PCI slots, integrated GPU, etc.). However, prototypes of the Power Mac 9700 are regularly discovered, as detailed in various articles.
The tower, reminiscent of the G3
The G3 logo
The interior
The model on eBay, listed for 500 Swiss francs, is well-equipped. It features a 375 MHz G3 processor (with 1 MB cache), 192 MB of RAM (apparently EDO DIMM), SCSI hard drives, an ATi Rage 128 with a DVD card (likely salvaged from a Blue G3), four PCI cards (FireWire, USB, Ethernet 100, SCSI), a DVD drive, and even a ZIP100 drive. Interestingly, the front indicates Power Mac G3, although it’s unclear if the label was added later (on other models previously seen, there’s nothing). Lastly, it runs on Mac OS 9.0.4.
