The Power Macintosh 7500 was one of the first PCI capable Macs manufactured by Apple Computer. It was released alongside the Power Macintosh 7200, and the Power Macintosh 8500 in October 1995. The 7500 had a PowerPC 601 processor rated at 100 MHz that was replaceable via a daughtercard. It also featured full composite video and s-video input capability, but no output, as the 7500 was designed to be a video conferencing system, not a multimedia editing machine—this was the 8500's task. The 7500 and 7200 featured a unique swing open chassis called "Outrigger" that allowed for easy upgrades, as the entire motherboard was accessible to the user after the hinged drive sleds were opened.

There were two derivative models: the Power Macintosh 7600, was identical to the 7500 except for the CPU; the 7600 used a PowerPC 604 or 604e processor instead of the 601. The Power Macintosh 7300, was identical to the 7600, but lacked the video inputs found in both the 7500 and 7600.

In the 7500 and its derivatives, the main bus runs at 45MHz or 50MHz (set by the CPU daughtercard), and the cpu at integer or half-integer multiples of this speed. The bus is temperamental, and can show sensitivity to different kinds of RAM or of L2 cache. Some cpu upgrades attempt to drive the main bus at a faster clock-rate, but success is not assured.

Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, was a line of Apple Macintosh workstation-class personal computers based on various models of PowerPC microprocessors that were developed, marketed, and supported by Apple Inc. from March 1994 until August 2006. The first models were the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100, and 8100, which offered speeds ranging from 60 to 110 MHz. These machines replaced Apple's Quadra series of personal computers, and were housed in cases very similar to systems sold by Apple up to that point. The Power Mac went on to become the mainstay of Apple's top-end offerings for twelve years, through a succession of case designs, four major generations of PowerPC chips, and a great deal of press coverage, design accolades, and technical controversy. In August 2006, the Power Mac's retirement was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference by Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller, making way for its Intel-based replacement, the Mac Pro.

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