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In 1987, Apple released the Apple Macintosh II for US$3,898 base.

The Macintosh II was the first modular Macintosh model because it allowed a user to customise it by selecting the type of display card or even have multiple displays.

It featured the slightly faster 68020 and operated at 16 MHz. It also came with the 68881 math co-processor and 1MB that was expandable up to a staggering 68MB.

It was also the first Mac to have room for a 40 MB SCSI hard disk. However, the hard drive was optional, though most people who bought one, upgraded to the hard drive. After all, at almost US$4,000, what's another US$1,000?

The Macintosh II also featured six NuBus expansion slots with one slot reserved for a graphics display as the Macintosh II did not come with any onboard display.

Apple later released the Macintosh IIx and Macintosh IIfx, which came with the fast Motorola 68030 32-bit processors.

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In 1994, Apple released the Apple Macintosh Quadra that they aimed at the professional markets for video, desktop publishing and other graphic-intensive applications.

The Quadra came with the Motorola 68040 processor running at 25MHz.

Like the Macintosh II series, the Quadra came with several expansion slots, though the Quadra came in a tower configuration.

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In 1992, Atari released the Falcon, which was significant for several reason. The first reason is that this was Atari's first 32-bit processor based machine using the Motorola 68030.

The performance of the unit was not as powerful as it could have been with the bus operating on 16 bits. However, it did have the Motorola 56000 digital signal processor that no other computer at the time had. Commodore-Amiga had toyed with the idea in the Amiga 3000+ prototype, but this unit was killed by management and replaced by the low cost Amiga 4000.

The second significant fact about this machine is that it was Atari's last home computer. While Atari had a prototype for a 68040 version, this never saw production.

Despite having left the computer business, new Falcon began appearing in 1995. C-Lab, a music company, bought the rights to the Falcon hardware design and began producing their own versions:

1) The Falcon Mk I was a direct continuation of Atari's Falcon030 with TOS 4.04.

2) The Falcon Mk II addressed a number of shortcomings in the original design and made it more suitable for music recording purposes.

Atari Falcon Specifications

CPU: Motorola MC68030
Speed: 16 MHz 68030 and 32 56000 MHz digital signal processor
Coprocessor: optional Motorola 68882 FPU
RAM: 4 MB expandable to 14 MB
ROM: 512 KB
Text modes: 40 or 80 characters x 25 lines (bitmapped graphics)
Graphics modes: ST Modes, TT Modes, VGA 640 x 480, True Colour.
Colours: Two modes : 16 / 15 bit with True color mode or 262144 with paletted mode
Sound: Eight channel 16 bit PCM audio system
I/O ports: RGB, VGA, PAL, DSP, SCSI, Stereo IN/OUT, Midi (2), LocalTalk, Cardridge, RS232c, Centronics, Analog Joystick (2), Digital Joystick (2), 68030 Bus

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In 1992, Commodore-Amiga released the Amiga 1200 for ?399 in the United Kingdom and $599 in the United States.

The Amiga 1200 featured the same all-in-one design as the Amiga 500, but with a much smaller footprint. However, the 1200 had room for an internal hard drive and sported the new operating system.
While the Amiga 1200 sold well, it did not sell as well as the game console. In order for Commodore to compete against these machine, Commodore released the generation 5 CD-based game console called the Amiga CD32 in June 1993.

Both the Amiga 1200 and the CD32 sold well, however, these were the last machines ever made by Commodore as it filed for bankruptcy liquidation in April 1994.

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In 1990, Commodore-Amiga released the Amiga 3000.

The Amiga 3000 was a radical departure form previous models and was marketed as a high-end graphics workstation. For a time, it was even used by W Industries for their highly acclaimed Virtuality machines.

The Amiga 3000 is powered by the fully 32-bit 68030, 32-bit bus pathways and fast 32-bit memory. It also comes with the Motorola 68882 and runs at either 16MHz or 25MHz.

The Amiga 3000 was also released with Unix System (SVR4) V operating system, which was the first PC to be certified for System V Unix. It could run X Windows and included TCP/IP, NFS and RFS for networking between different operating systems.

Three Amiga 3000 models were produced : 3000, 3000UX, and 3000T. The towerised version offered more ram and usually came with the A3640, which uses Motorola's 68040 running at about 4 times faster than the base machine.

Commodore developed the Amiga 3000+, which was designed to be the next Amiga and used an AGA video chip and a DSP. Instead of producing this computer, commodore slapped together the Amiga 4000. There are a few of these, but they are rare.

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In 1992, Commodore-Amiga released the 4000. It featured the AGA chipset allowing it to display 256,000 colours on screen from a palette of 16.8 million. It also introduced the new operating system, Workbench 3.0. Workbench 3.0 introduced the concept of datatypes.

Several variants were available, all fitted with 6MB RAM, 1.76mb High-Density disk drive and an internal hard drive as standard. However, the Amiga 4000 was not a major upgrade from the A3000.

Commodore fixed these issues by releasing the Amiga 4000 tower, which was the most advanced Amiga ever.
The Amiga 4000 was intended as a replacement for the A3000 & A3000T. It featured a big box like the Amiga 2000, which made it perfect for the video industry as the A3000 could not fit many of the expansion boards required to run video. The A4000, like the A3000, offered memory expansion up to 18MB -- a huge amount for that time period.

The A3000+ or AA3000 machine was eventually cancelled and the A4000 drafted for release due to the low cost of development. Many ex-Commodore engineers, Dave Haynie being the most notable, have never forgiven this marketing blunder that replaced a machine that corrected many of the Amigas failings with one based around an extremely flawed design.

The 4000, while a faster machine, had significantly slower drive access times compared to the A3000. Another flaw was the use of PC memory, which was about 50% slower than the A3000. However, a year later, Commodore released the A4000T that offered both SCSI and IDE, but still used the slower PC memory.