The Performa 475, also released as the LC 475 and the Quadra 605, was a budget Macintosh released by Apple in 1993 as a follow-up to the LC range. Costing only $900 on launch, it featured a number of cost-cutting features, chiefly the use of a Motorola 68LC040 as the CPU, instead of a full 68040. This runs at 25Mhz. (One of the most effective upgrades one can carry out on this Mac, therefore, is swapping the 68LC040 for its bigger brother in order to gain a full FPU)

The case is remarkably easy to open, being a 'pizza-box' which opens up by simply pulling up the two tabs on the back of the lid - there are no screws that need to be removed. Once open, one can replace the CPU and hard drive, add RAM (the machine will support up to 132Mb of memory in total, and comes with 4Mb on-board) or VRAM (up to 1Mb), and insert an LC PDS card. On the back of the machine are the traditional ADB, Serial, and SCSI ports, as well as the monitor input and power.

This machine can be upgraded to have a PowerPC processor via a PDS card, although a 68040 may be more cost-effective. This Mac is a nice, compact machine that, while rather limited in terms of usability today, still makes a fine machine for most basic tasks. It comes with only a 160Mb hard drive, but this can be upgraded easily enough, and will run Mac OS 8.1 without the PPC card. With an extra 8Mb of RAM, mine will happily load Netscape, and while a little slow at times works nicely as a web browser.

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