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Ask HN: Any Use for a Power Mac G4?
I have an old Power Mac G4 MDD on my hands and I was wondering if anyone could think of some cool uses for it!
- themodelplumber 4y agoNice, I used to use one of those at work! That was a weapon of mass creation back in the day. I don't know what counts as cool to you, but to me just using the thing as-outfitted seems pretty cool :D
- sitkack 4y agoRunning code destined for space, or the Xbox 1 or …
- Ecco 4y agoXbox 1 was x86. The 360 was PPC, but more recent than the G4. As a matter of fact, the first 360 dev kits were PowerMac G5.
- freemint 4y agoRemove the head sink and reuse it for other projects, beyond that i had no use for mine.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoDoes Linux support it? I recently installed Arch on my old MacBook ‘Early 2009’ (but that’s an Intel machine).
- LeFantome 4y agoA kindred spirit. I have Arch running on a 2008 iMac. It is almost embarrassing how much I use it. It is my main video conferencing spot as I like the big 4:3 screen. I was playing Diablo ( DevilitionX ) on it earlier today.
- Epiphany21 4y agoOpenBSD 7.1 still offers the macppc port. It was pretty fast on my later G4s.
- AussieWog93 4y agoSell it, man. There's a huge market for vintage PCs like this - people love to run old games/software on the original machines they were designed for. A quick look online suggests people value it around 2-3x as much as an i5 machine with 8GB RAM.
- gandalfff 4y agoWhoa! Where are you seeing it sold for that price?
- AussieWog93 4y agoeBay Australia. The Powermac goes for around $200 whereas a far more useful, but less sexy used office PC will set you back under $100.
- markus_zhang 4y agoI bought a g4 laptop for vintage computing, but once the initial excitement retired I kept it on bookshelf. I don't regret buying it because it only cost 50 bucks including postal charge and even the battery still works. So yeah I agree with a fellow commentor that if you don't know what to do maybe find someone who can pay premium and sell it.
- amatecha 4y agoMight want to keep the battery charged every so often or it will die completely. My iBook G4 batteries from ~2004 still hold plenty of charge, surprisingly enough! I've had far newer laptop batteries die completely because I forgot to recharge them... :(
- markus_zhang 4y agoThanks! Haven't charged for a while...
- ralphc 4y agoPut Adelie Linux on it, and you'll still be able to browse when the cyberattacks take down all the x86 machines.
- xet7 4y agoCheck can it run MorphOS ? https://www.morphos-team.net/hardware https://www.morphos-team.net/hardware https://www.morphos-team.net https://www.morphos-team.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorphOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorphOS
- gandalfff 4y agoLooks like it can! Very interesting
- renaudg 4y agoOf course, check out MorphOS. Also relevant : https://lowendmac.com/ https://lowendmac.com/
- amatecha 4y agoA PowerMac G4 will run the latest OpenBSD. https://www.openbsd.org/macppc.html https://www.openbsd.org/macppc.html I run it on one of my iMac G4's (and on many other non-PPC machines). It occurs to me that if you replace the HDD with an SSD it would also be quite a lot faster. If you don't want to use it, toss it on Craigslist for sure (if you have a local Craigslist site). Depending on the specs and your location I'd expect around $50-75 CAD (basing this on Vancouver Canada area and habitually searching the words "macintosh", "powermac", "powerpc" etc. literally every day :) )
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