4 ms·

I realize I wasn't the target market for these iMacs, but I had one, and I -hated it-. I worked at a retail store and at the time, we got 25 iMacs in. Almost e

I realize I wasn't the target market for these iMacs, but I had one, and I -hated it-. I worked at a retail store and at the time, we got 25 iMacs in. Almost every single one of them came back. People just didn't know what to do with them. I got one on discount, $699 I believe. Twice as much as the Celeron 300 eMachines that we had at the time. It wasn't very fast. It didn't have any expandability. The screen was terrible. 14/15" and it had a horrible dot pitch. You could run 800x600 but it would give you a headache. I returned it, and got the next hardware revision. It wasn't much better. It did, however, have a 6MB ATI video card in it so I could play some Quake. The screen was so limiting when it came to real work. The keyboard was passable but the mouse was awful. Later on, I stuck a pair of 128GB chips in it, and the biggest IDE HD I could find at the time (Maxtor 80GB?). It helped a little bit. But once I installed OS X, it was crippled. My friends PowerBook G3 Pismo was quite a bit faster but still too slow. It was a weird generation of Apple product where you got left behind almost as soon as it came out. About 10 years later, in 2009, I got another iMac (the newest model at the time), and completely fell in love with it.

lastofthemojito 6y ago
I hear you about those things being outdated quickly. I bought a Wallstreet Powerbook G3 back in '99 or so because it was a cool RISC laptop AND it was promised to run this amazing upcoming UNIX-based Mac OS X. When OS X came out, of course it ran...but it was an absolute dog on these machines. IIRC Apple never bothered to write optimized OS X video card drivers for these "old" machines, they just charged forward with the new stuff. The experience was definitely enough for me to swear off buying new Apple products for at least a decade (although OS X did eventually win me back).
- klodolph 6y ago
  My understanding is that these old systems were slow because the window system was a compositing window system, and old hardware doesn’t keep up well with it. Using a compositing window manager has a lot of advantages, though, which is why most modern window managers work that way. Windows Vista also introduced a compositing window manager IIRC, and it was also horribly slow on old systems.
- paxswill 6y ago
  The Wallstreet was weird for another reason: it was an Old World ROM. You (typically) had to boot at least partially into Classic before chaining into OS X or Linux. I seem to recall using XPostFacto to get 10.3 installed on it, which might cause been a bit better than the official max of 10.2?
trm42 6y ago
Yeah they were slow and had limitations but on the other hand G3 iMacs were the cheapest DV-video-editing setups for schools and other lowend usage. Editing with them felt really good compared to some P3/K6 PCs I and my friend had. And of course the editing experience was a lot more easier with iMovie than with some ~~pirated~~loaned Premiere.
city41 6y ago
The G3 era was still when Mac hardware was extremely expensive for what you got. The premium has come down a lot over the past couple decades (not counting a certain set of wheels, of course).
- muro 6y ago
  I bought my first laptop in 2000. They had a titanium powerbook g4 close by. It was an order of magnitude more expensive. (I think about 8500 DM / 4300 Eur vs 1100 DM / 600 Eur). My laptop was garbage, of course, but the other one was a few months of my salary at that time. I bought a Powermac 12" a few years later, but the price was much more reasonable then. Loved that machine.

lastofthemojito 6y ago

I hear you about those things being outdated quickly. I bought a Wallstreet Powerbook G3 back in '99 or so because it was a cool RISC laptop AND it was promised to run this amazing upcoming UNIX-based Mac OS X. When OS X came out, of course it ran...but it was an absolute dog on these machines. IIRC Apple never bothered to write optimized OS X video card drivers for these "old" machines, they just charged forward with the new stuff. The experience was definitely enough for me to swear off buying new Apple products for at least a decade (although OS X did eventually win me back).

klodolph 6y ago
My understanding is that these old systems were slow because the window system was a compositing window system, and old hardware doesn’t keep up well with it. Using a compositing window manager has a lot of advantages, though, which is why most modern window managers work that way. Windows Vista also introduced a compositing window manager IIRC, and it was also horribly slow on old systems.
paxswill 6y ago
The Wallstreet was weird for another reason: it was an Old World ROM. You (typically) had to boot at least partially into Classic before chaining into OS X or Linux. I seem to recall using XPostFacto to get 10.3 installed on it, which might cause been a bit better than the official max of 10.2?

trm42 6y ago

Yeah they were slow and had limitations but on the other hand G3 iMacs were the cheapest DV-video-editing setups for schools and other lowend usage. Editing with them felt really good compared to some P3/K6 PCs I and my friend had. And of course the editing experience was a lot more easier with iMovie than with some ~~pirated~~loaned Premiere.

city41 6y ago

The G3 era was still when Mac hardware was extremely expensive for what you got. The premium has come down a lot over the past couple decades (not counting a certain set of wheels, of course).

muro 6y ago
I bought my first laptop in 2000. They had a titanium powerbook g4 close by. It was an order of magnitude more expensive. (I think about 8500 DM / 4300 Eur vs 1100 DM / 600 Eur). My laptop was garbage, of course, but the other one was a few months of my salary at that time. I bought a Powermac 12" a few years later, but the price was much more reasonable then. Loved that machine.