10 ms·

M1 Inside a G4 Sunflower iMac

154 points by xqcgrek2 5y ago

jandrese 5y ago
Oh man, the poll below that post makes me weep. Between a Youtube video and a Blog post the Youtube video is winning by a country mile even though a text post would almost certainly be superior for people who want to know the details of how this was done. I happen to have a spare M1 Mac mini and a G4 at home so this project has my interest. The biggest question for me is how to interface the monitor.
- jccalhoun 5y ago
  Yes. It must be a generational divide or something. I see so many 20 minute videos that could be a 5 minute read and they have tons of views. I don't get it.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  I try to take the approach "why not both?" with my videos... but I understand why many people don't. Writing a good blog post requires basically a rewrite vs the script, but it's worth it for me since I often prefer a good, concisely-written post. It takes as much time as at least the script-writing portion of producing a video, but sometimes dozens of hours less if just acquiring some static images and a couple illustrations for the blog post. But even then, the difficulty comes when people are enticed by popularity and/or monetization. Since Google basically gave up on RSS, and Medium is an insular (albeit large) private platform, the ability to grow an audience blogging takes more time, requires more concentrated effort, and at best leads to very mild opportunities (overall). (The number of people like me online blogging for the sake of blogging / sharing knowledge into the void is probably constant, but as a percentage has shrunk down to nothingness.) Compare that to YouTube, where syndication and subscriptions are much less important and a little knowledge of how the algorithm works can lead to influence and/or monetization... and that's where we are today. Blogging is not dead, but outside of a few communities it seems to be low on the relevance scale.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
That is remarkably polished - can't even tell from the outside that it's been refitted:)
gedy 5y ago
Really nice! I'd be tempted to instead replace the whole screen with the new iMac VESA (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-vesa https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-vesa) and just use the base as a stand
- dddddaviddddd 5y ago
  I wonder how the weights of the screens would compare.
iSnow 5y ago
That's really good looking, if only we could replace the display with a Retina density one...
- sgt 5y ago
  My thought too. Once you get used to retina, you can't go back.
Damogran6 5y ago
A)There’s a TON of dead air space in a Mac Mini B)the main board would fit nicely where the DVD drive was in the iMac…this would end up being an ‘easy’ project, based on modern tech being so much smaller, except C) Interfacing with the monitor would take a little doing…pretty sure it’s not HDMI
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I think for a practical machine the screen would just be too low-res these days, I'd put a more modern LCD in there too if I could although if it's anything like the PowerBooks of that era it'll be a bit of a faff.
  - Eric_WVGG 5y ago
    It has been done! https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/imac-g4-mod-with-27-curved-screen.247415/ https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/imac-g4-mod-with-27-curve...
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      That's really impressive!
  - djrogers 5y ago
    1680x1050 isn't horrible for a 20" screen, and it's taller than a 16:19 display to boot. If you don't insist on retina for your 20" monitors, it wouldn't be remotely impractical.
StrangeDoctor 5y ago
I did this about 6 years ago with a NUC, many hours of work went into it. Spent so many hours converting the display cable into a dvi connector so any computer could be fit in. Replacing the screen panel was beyond my skill at the time, the springs in the neck and odd data & power cables make that a real pain. This version is really slick.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  I remember the whole 'megahurtz myth' being a thing at around that time. Apple swore blind that its 1.4 GHz G4 machines were comparable to an equivalent, far higher clock speed P4. I didn't know about pipelining, OOE, and vector extensions to be able to judge that at the time. Was it true? The P4 was a very limited, long pipelined chip, but I don't know what the G4 was actually like in comparison. One thing that I do remember about those machines is that they were massively memory bandwidth limited though, and iirc took PC100 ram at a time when everyone else had PC166 at least...
  - Synaesthesia 5y ago
    Yes a G4 was quite a bit faster than a P4 clock for clock, especially on floating point and vector operations and used quite little power too. You can go watch the annual videos where they show photoshop benchmarks running faster on the G3, G4 and G5s. But Intel did take the lead on occasion and kept up mostly. XP also felt faster in UI than early Mac OS X versions, although it did more and improved later on.
cehrlich 5y ago
That’s wonderful. The “Lamp” iMac is my favourite design they’ve ever done. I wish I had the need for a computer that this project could satisfy.
- machinevision 5y ago
  Mine too. I had one as a teenager and it was just wonderful to use.
sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
As a retro-computer kind of person, I find this disgusting :-)
- cestith 5y ago
  It would hurt to see a working unit dismantled for this, but if it was already broken then it'd be fine by me.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
This is absolutely wonderful, excellent concept and execution. I've been tempted to use a Power Mac G5 case for a modern build running helloSystem (a Tiger-ish skinned FreeBSD distribution) but this is far cooler! In my opinion the '00s produced some absolutely wonderful visual designs across Apple's product range. The fifth generation iPod, first generation iPhone, and pretty much all the iMacs and MacBooks from 2002-2008 are just really nice objects to look at and touch. This is true for the software as well, Tiger remains to this day my favourite interface for any OS ever and I think it's a real shame you can't skin modern macs to look like 2005-era macs!
- johnebgd 5y ago
  Completely agree. Tiger was the most pleasing OS I’ve used from a visual perspective. It was also peak skeuomorphic design. I miss Scott Forstall’s influence in every Apple product since he’s been gone.
  - leucineleprec0n 5y ago
    I may have talked to you about this, but I feel the same, iOS 7 also absolutely marred the sustained & graphical performance of the OS via the over reliance on increasingly n-dimensional neon or parallax bullshit whereas skeuomorphic design needed a lift but was nominally perfect by way of consistency and hardware demands. I miss Forstall a lot. I even feel their hardware today is designed a bit more sloppily. Idk, people cheered the departure of Ive or Forstall. Really other than Tim whom I don’t care for — Craig Federighi is cog incarnate. Software has only had one good fucking release on iOS since 7 — that being iOS 12. I can’t even imagine how pernicious the internal influence has been on a normative scale adjusted toward “Apple design and UX of Forstall”
    - johnebgd 5y ago
      I’m afraid that iOS release quality has always been terrible garbage for me even if I liked Scott Forstalls design aesthetics. I have had an iOS device since iPhone launched. October of 2012 my iPhone backups made locally and in iCloud could not be restored due to corruption. No one at Apple could help. I contacted Tim Cook’s office and they spent a short period of time confirming the inevitable. I lost about a year of text messages that I thought were backed up. Everything else I could recover from other systems.
Tijdreiziger 5y ago
Somewhat related: Hackintosh inside a G4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34en3ET7cqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34en3ET7cqY (Make sure to turn on subtitles when watching.)
mortenjorck 5y ago
Someone could make a mint with a high-quality, Sunflower-style base for the VESA-mount M1 iMac. Make it a docking station with some additional I/O, maybe a color-matched accent of some kind, and you'd have a winner.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Come to think of it, it would be nice to bring back the iMac G4 form factor, or something similarly playful.
- noneeeed 5y ago
  I really miss the playfulness and willingness to experiment in some of the old designs. Even the G4 cube was a really interesting idea, even if it had issues. As much as the asthetic doesn't appeal to me, I love that a lot of gamers mod their PCs with lights and other effects and really pimp them up. I like that people are having fun with the objects that fill their lives. Sometime all the sleek modernism just gets a bit soulless.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Apple should leapfrog them by creating an Apple Silicon gaming computer with a gradient of flickering lights that isn't just rainbow colors.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    The cube is weird to me. I wasn't around when it came out, but I have seen one or two online and in person. I find it intensely ugly but also really beautiful at the same time. It's almost like an ugly baby. It's ugly, but it's alive and it's yours.
    - geerlingguy 5y ago
      It's often called the toaster. I don't know if I love or hate the design, but I do want one. It was, like the trash can Mac Pro, a design with form over function... but was surprisingly easy to service but for the proprietary bits.
    - noneeeed 5y ago
      This is kind of my point really. All those various "playful" mac designs were loved or hated by people, but they were interesting enough for people to have opinions about. Now the only aesthetic that anyone goes for is a tedious, utilitarian sleekness with a different colours and people argue about the relative merits of hole-punch or notches for their camera. I'm kind of excited by what I've seen of the Pixel 6. The camera ridge seems to be getting a lot of jokes, but whether you like it or not it looks like someone actually thought about it and made a really conscious decision. Most camera bumps just look like they had to put the camera _somewhere_ so lets stick them in a corner cluster because of some internal engineering decision. The P6 is probably the first phone I've seen where the placement of the cameras looks like a visual design decision not just an engineering one. It reminds me of when I've worked on stage sets and props. Whatever you do needs to look _intentional_, it has to look like you meant it to be like that, not that you aimed for one thing and ended up with whatever _this_ is, or whatever you had to hand.
alexjplant 5y ago
In college (so about a decade ago) I bought one of these and put Debian on it. I used it for a year to play Marathon, run XMMS, browse the web, and write OCaml for school. IIRC there was no driver for the Nvidia display chipset so it had to use software rendering but it still (barely) managed to keep up. Fun times! Later on I decided to install a more spiritually-appropriate OS and threw OpenBSD on it. It sat on my kitchen bar and didn't see much use until I ended up tossing it during a move last year. Great machine. My grandparents had a Mac catalog at the turn of the millennium that advertised these and boasted about how the processors outperformed P4s with double the clock speed. I didn't believe them back then but now I know better ;-)
m0ngr31 5y ago
Wouldn't the resolution on that be pretty trash if they haven't replaced the panel?
- kccqzy 5y ago
  It would be 1680x1050. If you don't care about Retina it's enough resolution.
- lostgame 5y ago
  The resolution on these things is fantastic - and the colours seem vibrant and clear. I love mine.
tablespoon 5y ago
> In celebration of Steve Job’s life and his inspiration to many, I wanted to show a passion project I’ve been working on that I think Steve would be proud of. Something that wasn’t possible 20 years ago but is now. Steve Jobs didn't strike me as the kind of person who'd be proud of a fan doing something like this.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  There's an other Steve at Apple who loves that kind of tinkering however.
  - st_goliath 5y ago
    > There's an other Steve at Apple ... *There Woz Assuming you mean Wozniak, who left in 1985[1]. Then again, the company is big enough, I cannot exclude the existence of other Steves[2], some of whom might like this kind of tinkering. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak#Final_departure_from_Apple_workforce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak#Final_departure_... [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSteveLimit https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSteveLimit
    - sgt 5y ago
      Wozniak is actually still an Apple employee.
      - BitwiseFool 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure Woz mentioned in an interview that he still "reports to Steve" on the Org Chart. Edit: "Based on the last Apple organizational chart that he was aware of, Wozniak said that he still reported to Jobs." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/steve-wozniak-still-on-apple-payroll-jokes-he-still-reports-to-jobs.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/steve-wozniak-still-on-apple...
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Apple's entire being seems to be against allowing the customer any control at all. Maybe it was different years ago but every Apple product I've touched has been a very pretty prison (which isn't necessarily a bad thing)
freediver 5y ago
Bought one of these just few weeks ago. iMac G4 is peak Apple design, doesn't get much better than this.
- muro 5y ago
  Yes, it's a beautiful machine. I like the cube as well.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ngcc_hk 5y ago
How about g5 … daughter card … or just replace the whole motherboard …

154 points by xqcgrek2 5y ago

Oh man, the poll below that post makes me weep. Between a Youtube video and a Blog post the Youtube video is winning by a country mile even though a text post would almost certainly be superior for people who want to know the details of how this was done. I happen to have a spare M1 Mac mini and a G4 at home so this project has my interest. The biggest question for me is how to interface the monitor.

jccalhoun 5y ago
Yes. It must be a generational divide or something. I see so many 20 minute videos that could be a 5 minute read and they have tons of views. I don't get it.
geerlingguy 5y ago
I try to take the approach "why not both?" with my videos... but I understand why many people don't. Writing a good blog post requires basically a rewrite vs the script, but it's worth it for me since I often prefer a good, concisely-written post. It takes as much time as at least the script-writing portion of producing a video, but sometimes dozens of hours less if just acquiring some static images and a couple illustrations for the blog post. But even then, the difficulty comes when people are enticed by popularity and/or monetization. Since Google basically gave up on RSS, and Medium is an insular (albeit large) private platform, the ability to grow an audience blogging takes more time, requires more concentrated effort, and at best leads to very mild opportunities (overall). (The number of people like me online blogging for the sake of blogging / sharing knowledge into the void is probably constant, but as a percentage has shrunk down to nothingness.) Compare that to YouTube, where syndication and subscriptions are much less important and a little knowledge of how the algorithm works can lead to influence and/or monetization... and that's where we are today. Blogging is not dead, but outside of a few communities it seems to be low on the relevance scale.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

That is remarkably polished - can't even tell from the outside that it's been refitted:)

gedy 5y ago

Really nice! I'd be tempted to instead replace the whole screen with the new iMac VESA (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-vesa https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-vesa) and just use the base as a stand

dddddaviddddd 5y ago
I wonder how the weights of the screens would compare.

iSnow 5y ago

That's really good looking, if only we could replace the display with a Retina density one...

sgt 5y ago
My thought too. Once you get used to retina, you can't go back.

Damogran6 5y ago

A)There’s a TON of dead air space in a Mac Mini B)the main board would fit nicely where the DVD drive was in the iMac…this would end up being an ‘easy’ project, based on modern tech being so much smaller, except C) Interfacing with the monitor would take a little doing…pretty sure it’s not HDMI

BoxOfRain 5y ago
I think for a practical machine the screen would just be too low-res these days, I'd put a more modern LCD in there too if I could although if it's anything like the PowerBooks of that era it'll be a bit of a faff.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  It has been done! https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/imac-g4-mod-with-27-curved-screen.247415/ https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/imac-g4-mod-with-27-curve...
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    That's really impressive!
- djrogers 5y ago
  1680x1050 isn't horrible for a 20" screen, and it's taller than a 16:19 display to boot. If you don't insist on retina for your 20" monitors, it wouldn't be remotely impractical.

StrangeDoctor 5y ago

I did this about 6 years ago with a NUC, many hours of work went into it. Spent so many hours converting the display cable into a dvi connector so any computer could be fit in. Replacing the screen panel was beyond my skill at the time, the springs in the neck and odd data & power cables make that a real pain. This version is really slick.

azalemeth 5y ago
I remember the whole 'megahurtz myth' being a thing at around that time. Apple swore blind that its 1.4 GHz G4 machines were comparable to an equivalent, far higher clock speed P4. I didn't know about pipelining, OOE, and vector extensions to be able to judge that at the time. Was it true? The P4 was a very limited, long pipelined chip, but I don't know what the G4 was actually like in comparison. One thing that I do remember about those machines is that they were massively memory bandwidth limited though, and iirc took PC100 ram at a time when everyone else had PC166 at least...
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Yes a G4 was quite a bit faster than a P4 clock for clock, especially on floating point and vector operations and used quite little power too. You can go watch the annual videos where they show photoshop benchmarks running faster on the G3, G4 and G5s. But Intel did take the lead on occasion and kept up mostly. XP also felt faster in UI than early Mac OS X versions, although it did more and improved later on.

cehrlich 5y ago

That’s wonderful. The “Lamp” iMac is my favourite design they’ve ever done. I wish I had the need for a computer that this project could satisfy.

machinevision 5y ago
Mine too. I had one as a teenager and it was just wonderful to use.

sedan_baklazhan 5y ago

As a retro-computer kind of person, I find this disgusting :-)

cestith 5y ago
It would hurt to see a working unit dismantled for this, but if it was already broken then it'd be fine by me.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

This is absolutely wonderful, excellent concept and execution. I've been tempted to use a Power Mac G5 case for a modern build running helloSystem (a Tiger-ish skinned FreeBSD distribution) but this is far cooler! In my opinion the '00s produced some absolutely wonderful visual designs across Apple's product range. The fifth generation iPod, first generation iPhone, and pretty much all the iMacs and MacBooks from 2002-2008 are just really nice objects to look at and touch. This is true for the software as well, Tiger remains to this day my favourite interface for any OS ever and I think it's a real shame you can't skin modern macs to look like 2005-era macs!

johnebgd 5y ago
Completely agree. Tiger was the most pleasing OS I’ve used from a visual perspective. It was also peak skeuomorphic design. I miss Scott Forstall’s influence in every Apple product since he’s been gone.
- leucineleprec0n 5y ago
  I may have talked to you about this, but I feel the same, iOS 7 also absolutely marred the sustained & graphical performance of the OS via the over reliance on increasingly n-dimensional neon or parallax bullshit whereas skeuomorphic design needed a lift but was nominally perfect by way of consistency and hardware demands. I miss Forstall a lot. I even feel their hardware today is designed a bit more sloppily. Idk, people cheered the departure of Ive or Forstall. Really other than Tim whom I don’t care for — Craig Federighi is cog incarnate. Software has only had one good fucking release on iOS since 7 — that being iOS 12. I can’t even imagine how pernicious the internal influence has been on a normative scale adjusted toward “Apple design and UX of Forstall”
  - johnebgd 5y ago
    I’m afraid that iOS release quality has always been terrible garbage for me even if I liked Scott Forstalls design aesthetics. I have had an iOS device since iPhone launched. October of 2012 my iPhone backups made locally and in iCloud could not be restored due to corruption. No one at Apple could help. I contacted Tim Cook’s office and they spent a short period of time confirming the inevitable. I lost about a year of text messages that I thought were backed up. Everything else I could recover from other systems.

Tijdreiziger 5y ago

Somewhat related: Hackintosh inside a G4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34en3ET7cqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34en3ET7cqY (Make sure to turn on subtitles when watching.)

mortenjorck 5y ago

Someone could make a mint with a high-quality, Sunflower-style base for the VESA-mount M1 iMac. Make it a docking station with some additional I/O, maybe a color-matched accent of some kind, and you'd have a winner.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Come to think of it, it would be nice to bring back the iMac G4 form factor, or something similarly playful.

noneeeed 5y ago
I really miss the playfulness and willingness to experiment in some of the old designs. Even the G4 cube was a really interesting idea, even if it had issues. As much as the asthetic doesn't appeal to me, I love that a lot of gamers mod their PCs with lights and other effects and really pimp them up. I like that people are having fun with the objects that fill their lives. Sometime all the sleek modernism just gets a bit soulless.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Apple should leapfrog them by creating an Apple Silicon gaming computer with a gradient of flickering lights that isn't just rainbow colors.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  The cube is weird to me. I wasn't around when it came out, but I have seen one or two online and in person. I find it intensely ugly but also really beautiful at the same time. It's almost like an ugly baby. It's ugly, but it's alive and it's yours.
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    It's often called the toaster. I don't know if I love or hate the design, but I do want one. It was, like the trash can Mac Pro, a design with form over function... but was surprisingly easy to service but for the proprietary bits.
  - noneeeed 5y ago
    This is kind of my point really. All those various "playful" mac designs were loved or hated by people, but they were interesting enough for people to have opinions about. Now the only aesthetic that anyone goes for is a tedious, utilitarian sleekness with a different colours and people argue about the relative merits of hole-punch or notches for their camera. I'm kind of excited by what I've seen of the Pixel 6. The camera ridge seems to be getting a lot of jokes, but whether you like it or not it looks like someone actually thought about it and made a really conscious decision. Most camera bumps just look like they had to put the camera _somewhere_ so lets stick them in a corner cluster because of some internal engineering decision. The P6 is probably the first phone I've seen where the placement of the cameras looks like a visual design decision not just an engineering one. It reminds me of when I've worked on stage sets and props. Whatever you do needs to look _intentional_, it has to look like you meant it to be like that, not that you aimed for one thing and ended up with whatever _this_ is, or whatever you had to hand.

alexjplant 5y ago

In college (so about a decade ago) I bought one of these and put Debian on it. I used it for a year to play Marathon, run XMMS, browse the web, and write OCaml for school. IIRC there was no driver for the Nvidia display chipset so it had to use software rendering but it still (barely) managed to keep up. Fun times! Later on I decided to install a more spiritually-appropriate OS and threw OpenBSD on it. It sat on my kitchen bar and didn't see much use until I ended up tossing it during a move last year. Great machine. My grandparents had a Mac catalog at the turn of the millennium that advertised these and boasted about how the processors outperformed P4s with double the clock speed. I didn't believe them back then but now I know better ;-)

m0ngr31 5y ago

Wouldn't the resolution on that be pretty trash if they haven't replaced the panel?

kccqzy 5y ago
It would be 1680x1050. If you don't care about Retina it's enough resolution.
lostgame 5y ago
The resolution on these things is fantastic - and the colours seem vibrant and clear. I love mine.

tablespoon 5y ago

> In celebration of Steve Job’s life and his inspiration to many, I wanted to show a passion project I’ve been working on that I think Steve would be proud of. Something that wasn’t possible 20 years ago but is now. Steve Jobs didn't strike me as the kind of person who'd be proud of a fan doing something like this.

908B64B197 5y ago
There's an other Steve at Apple who loves that kind of tinkering however.
- st_goliath 5y ago
  > There's an other Steve at Apple ... *There Woz Assuming you mean Wozniak, who left in 1985[1]. Then again, the company is big enough, I cannot exclude the existence of other Steves[2], some of whom might like this kind of tinkering. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak#Final_departure_from_Apple_workforce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak#Final_departure_... [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSteveLimit https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSteveLimit
  - sgt 5y ago
    Wozniak is actually still an Apple employee.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure Woz mentioned in an interview that he still "reports to Steve" on the Org Chart. Edit: "Based on the last Apple organizational chart that he was aware of, Wozniak said that he still reported to Jobs." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/steve-wozniak-still-on-apple-payroll-jokes-he-still-reports-to-jobs.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/steve-wozniak-still-on-apple...
mhh__ 5y ago
Apple's entire being seems to be against allowing the customer any control at all. Maybe it was different years ago but every Apple product I've touched has been a very pretty prison (which isn't necessarily a bad thing)

freediver 5y ago

Bought one of these just few weeks ago. iMac G4 is peak Apple design, doesn't get much better than this.

muro 5y ago
Yes, it's a beautiful machine. I like the cube as well.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ngcc_hk 5y ago

How about g5 … daughter card … or just replace the whole motherboard …