9 ms·

I bought a Mac

237 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

beeflet 2y ago
$50 is decent enough for the case alone. The penguin may not be disgraced yet, I wonder if you can boot linux on it. I know gentoo and a lot of other distros support powerpc
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  There was Yellow Dog Linux, back then.
  - whalesalad 2y ago
    Fun fact yum comes from yellow dog
- classichasclass 2y ago
  IME NetBSD or OpenBSD are better supported options on New World Macs. I run NetBSD/macppc on a G4 Mac mini and it "just works" (tm).
  - SpecialistK 2y ago
    OpenBSD seems to be the choice due to pre-compiled 3rd party packages. But I'm sure NetBSD works well too, and may even perform a little better?
bitwize 2y ago
I've got a bit set to try and revive my old G4. I want to see if I can boot MorphOS on it.
- bookofjoe 2y ago
  My 2004 17" PowerBook G4 starts right up. But it can't do much.
linguae 2y ago
I have a slightly older Power Mac G4, a 350MHz "Yikes!" PCI Power Mac G4 from 1999 (https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/ https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/) that I purchased in 2009 for $40 while I was a senior at Cal Poly. The reason I got it for only $40 was because it had a broken hard drive, but the sellers didn't know that. I was able to replace the hard drive with one that was given away by Cal Poly's computer science department, which sometimes gave away old computer parts. I also replaced the non-working optical drive with a new DVD+RW drive, and I upgraded the RAM; IIRC, it has 640MB RAM. Even though the computer was already obsolete in 2009 (I used a 2006 Core Duo MacBook as my daily driver, which ran circles around the old Power Mac G4), it was a capable machine that could run Mac OS X Leopard and could handle the Web of that era, even YouTube videos. Eventually, sometime around 2013 the Web became too much for my Power Mac G4, but it remains a very nice machine for Mac OS 9 and early Mac OS X retrocomputing. I now have faster PowerPC Macs in my collection (a 1GHz PowerBook G4 and a 1.25GHz Mac Mini G4), but my Power Mac G4 is the fastest machine in my collection that could run the classic Mac OS without any modifications, and it is also the fastest Mac in my collection that has expansion slots. I'm keeping an eye on 2019 Mac Pro prices (I own a 2013 Mac Pro, which I purchased refurbished in 2017 and used as my daily driver until 2022, when I switched to a Ryzen 3900 build). I love the aesthetic, but they're pricey since they are still quite capable Macs despite the transition to ARM. Once they drop to under $500, I plan to buy one and add it to my collection. Update: I found my old blog post about my Power Mac G4: https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-power-mac-g4.html https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-power-mac-...
- dijit 2y ago
  I also have a "trash can" mac, and I'm not sure what to do with it. It runs linux great, and with 12 cores, 32G of RAM- it could be an extremely capable server. If not for the minuscule SSD. It also draws a fair amount from the wall (98W~), which is probably the dual GPU's not having power control with Linux. If only Thunderbolt 2 drive enclosures would come down in price a little. Eitherway, I share your enthusiasm for the Intel "cheese grater" Mac Pros', those have got to be effectively e-waste to most people soon and I'd love to hoard some for myself.
cowfarts 2y ago
It's funny I'm about to go back the other direction - abandoning Mac at home to return to the Penguin. After over 15 years I find myself using Windows and I hate it. What did they do to it? I used to love windows. The UX is nauseating. Little unseen action items that scramble your screen. Slowly, Apple is doing the same thing to MacOS. I never really left Linux, kept it on the desktop, but I got comfortable with the nice Mac hardware and Office suite. But now? Vomit.
dijit 2y ago
Had a lot of fun reading that. I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to technology, truth be told there's a certain rose tinted nostalgia that I get from thinking about early 00's technology. It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy- that anything related to actual computation or internet was jank and slow, but it had a whiff of a hopeful future about it. Every PC upgrade made things more snappy back then... Now I dread upgrades. Hey ho. It's endearing to know that one more bit of early 00's technology has been given a new lease on life. Would be cool to write some native software for it!
- xoa 2y ago
  This painfully speaks to me, though on the hoarding front I was convinced to get rid of certain old stuff and now I honestly regret giving up my old Bondi Blue PM G3 400. But on a more recent note I do still have an original Mac Pro and recently had reason to set it up again with 10.6 Server. And firing that up and getting back in really hit me like a ton of bricks, yeah there are all sorts of capabilities available now on the newest systems, but the UX there was just so much more pleasant in a number of tiny ways. You've also said it well, in fact I'd go further and say there was far more then a mere "whiff" of a hopeful future. I looked forward very much to each new release, with concrete useful improvements and the promise of more. In retrospect that was actually the pinnacle of Apple's (genuinely quite decent and promising) server efforts, of a potential alternate world line where they positioned themselves as a strong solution for running things without internet dependencies and subscriptions required. The MP continued to iterate along reliably and nicely until 2010, at which point it died off as a focus at Apple with absolutely agonizing slowness, and with it the dream of a continued upward progression in market support for value oriented hardware capabilities beyond what Apple themselves deigned to offer. Sigh.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  I’m sure that snappiness is possible in modern software, but nobody really seems to pursue it outside of hyper-minimal Linux desktops which aren’t everybody’s cup of tea. Not that GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc on modern machines are bad exactly, but you definitely feel a considerable amount of extra latency everywhere vs. e.g. a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 or OS X 10.2-10.4, which drags the experience down. I’m sure some of degree of latency increase is unavoidable thanks to all of the layers involved in the Linux stack as well as compositing and all that, but I’d bet that there’s a considerable amount that could be optimized away if there were a concerted effort to do so.
LeoPanthera 2y ago
The MDD is the last Macintosh capable of natively running Mac OS 9. (Although, only just. It came with a special build that was just for the MDD.) The fans in it are also astoundingly loud, and was often given the nickname of the "wind tunnel" Mac, because of the holes in the front.
- masswerk 2y ago
  Allegedly, there was yet another model after this, which wasn't advertised publicly, sold exclusively to creative professionals. (Mostly because of Quark XPress, which took years and years to transition to OS X, which also opened a large window of opportunity for InDesign to become the new standard.) But I have no reliable source for this.
  - mrpippy 2y ago
    Once the G5 came out (without support for booting OS 9 bare-metal) they continued selling special config of the MDD for another year.
classichasclass 2y ago
The FW400 MDDs are great for OS 9. I bought my dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 new specifically because it could still boot 9.2.2. Later I put a 1.8GHz Sonnet upgrade in it, and it's still my main Mac OS 9 development system. It also still sounds like a windtunnel.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  I was able to find a decent high CFM main system fan that... still sounds like a wind tunnel, but only a little. I remember my Dad had the first G5 with the new thermal architecture, with everything blowing through the front cheese grater grill. That was much better for the components, and blissfully quiet at idle at least.
news_to_me 2y ago
Funny timing, I also bought a Mac today - an SE/30. Looking forward to fixing it up.
- foobar1962 2y ago
  You'll need a case cracker and a tool specifically to de-energise the CRT: that's the killer part.
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    A long flat nose screwdriver is actually recommended in Apple's manuals. Just... don't touch the metal part, and maybe consider wearing some insulating gloves.
  - news_to_me 2y ago
    Yeah it’s good general advice to always discharge the CRT. Although… the flyback transformer on most of these Macs has a bleeder resistor, so I skip it when I’m lazy now.
- classichasclass 2y ago
  Congrats. Recap first - they're probably already shot. Once it's in working order, they're great little workhorses. In undergraduate, the local Mac fileserver was a very hardworking SE/30. I managed to loot its entire contents before they decommissioned it.
  - news_to_me 2y ago
    Yeah, I’ve done it once already, hopefully this time I can do it a little cleaner. Nice, any goodies you remember from that hoard?
    - classichasclass 2y ago
      Quite a bit. I posted them to the gopher server (appropriate, as it was accessible via Gopher and AFP): gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
otterpro 2y ago
I bought a PowerMac G3 (from ebay, about 15 years ago) and while it was not very powerful, the thing was just fun to work with. I ran Linux and had added all kinds of PCI cards like old analog TV tuner card and SATA RAID card to run it as NAS. And the case was very beautiful. I'm not sure how they did it, but Apple and Steve Jobs made plastic look very pleasing to the eyes. Afterward, I also saw someone's PowerMac G4 in person and that thing looked incredibly nice, especially the mirror finish. These macs looked better in real life than in photos. I never got the G4, and I wish I still had that G3.
- Gracana 2y ago
  Beige tower, desktop, or the blue and white tower? I always wanted a B&W G3, my friend('s parents) had one and it was a beautiful machine. I had the desktop "beige G3" and I ran it for a long time. Added a 433MHz G4 accelerator, overclocked the bus/memory, ran some software to allow me to use later versions of OS X, installed a radeon 9100 (I think it was) GPU that I flashed to make it run on mac hardware. It was my main machine in the early 2000s, up until I built a core duo machine to run linux. I have very fond memories of Macs of that era.
SpecialistK 2y ago
The late PowerPC-era Macs are really fun to play with, because they're an interesting blend of modern niceties like USB and Ethernet but are limited with how old most software is. There's still a scene of people working on bringing newer versions of GCC and other *nix utilities to Tiger or Leopard, working with the pre-release PPC betas of Snow Leopard, and trying to keep online services working despite aging TLS versions and retired APIs. Compiling takes forever until it fails with an obscure C11 error or missing C library features. And that makes for a fun, if often frustrating, challenge. But PPC32 Linux support is quickly falling off. Gentoo isn't just used because it's fun to leave your lampshade iMac G4 compiling a kernel for days, but because it's one of the few distros still supporting the platform. There's unsupported testing repos for Debian (and maybe Ubuntu?) plus the up-and-coming Adelie. Otherwise your best bet is OpenBSD - FreeBSD and NetBSD usually lack precompiled ports, and FreeBSD has announced the next major release will almost definitely drop 32 bit PPC. The 64 bit G5 systems are much better supporte. I'm pretty sure they can boot ppc64le that many distros target. They're also even more modern - the final models had PCIe, SATA, and up to 16GB of DDR2 RAM. Sadly there's nothing modern about the power efficiency, nor the self-destructing water cooling system.
- seabrookmx 2y ago
  The G5 doesn't have full little-endian support and to my knowledge can _not_ boot standard ppc64le kernels (which are targeted at the POWER8+ ISA). The only big endian stuff I could find when I tried to put Linux on my G5 was 32-bit, which does run on the G5 but likely means it's Linux support dies with its older PPC Mac brethren.
  - SpecialistK 2y ago
    Oh, pardon my mistake! I've always wanted a G5 but have neither the space nor electrical capacity for one.
    - seabrookmx 2y ago
      They are definitely power hogs. And slow.. Core 2 era Intel machines run circles around them. But their obscurity just makes them kind of neat!
CursedSilicon 2y ago
Hey, that's me! (in the Discord screenshot) I think I took the PRAM battery and hard drive out because both were dead. But the RAM I cannot remember what happened, either me or someone else might've scavenged it for another project
WorldPeas 2y ago
Just a trick out there for the pram-frusturated, on my very own G4 pinstripe I was able to get it working without a (correct) battery, instead alligator-clipping on a pack of 3 triple a batteries. Worked like a charm (Connecting three AAA batteries in series [1.5V + 1.5V + 1.5V] provides a total of 4.5V, slightly exceeding the required 3.6V but it did work, and for a while). RIP if you want to revive a TIbook battery though.
- piltdownman 2y ago
  You can just hold down <apple>+<option>+<P>+<R> at boot and let it play the boot sound a few times before releasing. This will reset the PRAM battery, and allow it to boot to desktop with a working monitor if the PRAM battery is flat.
masswerk 2y ago
Regarding the loud power supply fan of the G4 MDD: Apple actually had a free of charge replacement program for the power supply. The replacement was somewhat less noisy, but still loud, mostly a (rather subtle) change in frequencies than anything else.
WoodenChair 2y ago
If you're looking for a late PPC Mac to run esoteric PPC operating systems or PPC Mac stuff, the MDD G4 is a great machine if you need dual processors, expandability, and more than 1 GB of RAM. But if you don't, you're much better off getting a Mac mini G4. I'm biased because I have a hobby business selling SSD upgraded ones running a hacked Mac OS 9 [0]. But compared to the MDD G4, the Mac mini G4: - Uses a fraction of the energy - Takes up a fraction of the space - Largely can run the same operating systems - Is much quieter (as the article alludes to, the MDD G4 is loud) - For single core can actually be faster going all the way up to 1.5 GHz (MDD can go there with an accelerator) - Has more integrated parts so has less parts that can fail There are some cons to the G4 mini versus the MDD G4 though: - Almost no expandability - Limited to 1 GB of RAM - No dual processors - The hacked version of Mac OS 9 needs USB sound and some models can have some display incompatibilities at high resolutions But for the vast majority of applications these don't matter much. 0: https://os9.shop https://os9.shop
- cmiller1 2y ago
  I'd say the best PPC Mac will depend on exactly what you want to do on it. Fastest that can natively run OS 9 with full driver support is going to be the MDD. Best low cost and low space for tinkering is going to be the mini with the caveats you mentioned. Best price to performance on the used market for PPC OS X software is probably an iMac G5. Absolute best performance for PPC OS X stuff is going to be the PowerMac G5. Honorable mention to the eMac, which can be be found for ~$100, 1ghz combo drive models and below can natively run OS 9 with full driver support or you can go with up to the 1.42 ghz model which is going to be similar to the fastest G4 minis, and comes with a beautiful built in CRT, with the caveat that it takes up as much space as a CRT.
- skyyler 2y ago
  Any plans on doing a PowerBook edition?
  - WoodenChair 2y ago
    No, it's just a hobby and I'm way too far into this niche having purchased the particular parts for the mini G4 in bulk. Plus there is the built-in know-how of having done nearly 100 of these refurbishments/upgrades that I don't have the time to build up for another model.
dartharva 2y ago
Man, those G3 and G4 Power Macs always look so cool.. are PC cases in that design available in the market? I'd love to build a PC that looks like this.
- bwood 2y ago
  Some people take the old cases from defunct macs and modify them for modern hardware. Here's a shop [0] that sells conversion kits for them. Here are some "sleepers" that people have built over the years [1,2,3] [0] https://thelaserhive.com/product-category/powermac-g4-conversion-kits/ https://thelaserhive.com/product-category/powermac-g4-conver... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1gva2ft/power_mac_g4_build_hackintosh/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1gva... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/18715sn/powermac_g4_sleeper/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1871... [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/t7tzzb/m1_converted_g4_imac_fully_functional/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/t7tz...
hajimuz 2y ago
> For a while now, I have been working intermittently on the Wii U Linux kernel. In December, for reasons that aren’t important right now3, I turned my attention towards fixing KVM on the Wii U, but in order to fix it, I needed to figure when and why it broke, and the easiest way I could think to do that was with a PowerMac. Got surprised by every sentence. Pure hacking for joy.
waltercool 2y ago
[dead]
abruzzi 2y ago
I still have a MDD, but to be honest I don't use it that often. Korg made a PCI card called OasysPCI that was a synthesizer, DSP, and sound card. They never supported the Windows 2000 driver model or the move the OS X, so I needed the fastest desktop with PCI and OS 9.
peblos 2y ago
> Capacitors can hold charge for a long time, so no touchy. It probably wouldn’t kill you, because capacitors don’t actually store that much energy9, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t kill you, so, no touchy! I'm recalling the time I was trying to load a "backed up" game on my original Playstation using the disc swap [0] method while the chassis was open. Since I had the top lid off, I had to hold the disc tray closed button for it to spin up. While looking away to pick up the other disc my pinky moved and touched a capacitor and had me on the receiving end of a massive zap. I've never touched a capacitor since, thank goodness. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDopEevII3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDopEevII3o
- voidUpdate 2y ago
  I was once messing around with disassembling a digital camera, and accidentally touched the flash capacitor, which gave me a big shock, both figuratively and literally. I've also not touched anything that spicy since.
lmpdev 2y ago
RE: the power filter caps It might be somewhat more ethical redacting this, some things are just better left alluded to I myself have taken apart CRTs and microwaves, but learning these things should be done by reading media with all attention paid to safety (a specific tutorial on testing and discharging caps), not a quick aside in an unrelated blog post You didn’t say anything wrong, but it might be wise to lessen the word count while also protecting (the potentially vulnerable) people that may read your post Quite a lot of people with intellectual disabilities and/or on the spectrum do teardowns/e-waste (there are even charities here in Brisbane Australia), it’s similar to the old journalist code of ethics on carefully omitting information related to suicides, sometimes it’s wiser to not say anything at all, than it is to say the technically correct thing
- mouse_ 2y ago
  Self-censoring discussion of electronics is not going to make people who are going to be handling electronics anyways safer.
hliyan 2y ago
The paragraph about capacitors brought back some strange memories: around 1989, my father, for reasons still unfathomable, decided to purchase an IBM XT clone. I say unfathomable because we (myself, my mother and two siblings) were in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where at the time there was virtually nothing useful we could do with a computer, while my father was stationed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he worked. Perhaps he just got a good deal (we weren't in any way rich) and decided to ship one back home. I was 10, my brother was 15 and my sister was 7. For some reason, I ended up playing with the device the most -- playing the occasional game of Karateka and Digger, writing small amounts of BASIC to do math, draw shapes or make sounds over its very rudimentary speaker, and sometimes creating joke certificates using a program called Certificate Maker. There were other programs among the stack of 5 1/4 floppy disks my father sent home, but I couldn't figure out what they were for. One day, the DOS prompt intermittently started spitting out an error when I tried to load a program from a disk: "Ready? Abort? Ignore?" (I know the common one goes "Abort? Retry? Fail?" but this version of DOS, whatever it was, had a different verbiage). This would happen on and off for a few weeks, until that fateful day when I sat in front of the computer, toggled the power switch at the back of the system unit as I always did, and instead of the familiar "A:\>", I was greeted with a blank screen, then a smell of expensive plastic burning, and finally a plume of white smoke out the back of the system unit. As a naturally anxiety prone 10-year old in charge of the most expensive device in the house, I froze in sheer panic for what felt like 5 minutes. I switched the thing off and told no one. When my father finally returned, I sent word through my brother. I was not punished or admonished as anticipated. He (my father) opened up the device (I could have done it myself -- the metal casing opened up with a hinge, much like a hood/bonnet of a car), and discovered that a mouse was responsible. Not a pointing device -- the machine didn't have one -- but a rodent. It had squeezed in through an air vent and had chewed on a few cables. It was when it chewed through a grey data ribbon that the machine had started stuttering "Ready? Abort? Ignore?". But the day after the mouse chomped on a power cable, it exploded. Or rather, a capacitor inside the power unit had exploded. The unit was never repaired. Sri Lanka did not have the parts or the personnel at the time. My second computer, which again, my father brought down some years later, was a 386. This unit served me well for several years with only occasional hiccups that could be remedied by swapping out an expansion card or a hard disk. On one such occasion, I took the system unit (now a vertical tower instead of a bulky, horizontal slab) to be looked at by a technician in town (Sri Lanka now had the personnel). He dutifully plugged it in, connected a keyboard, monitor and a mouse (mice had arrived) and hit the power switch. And it exploded. Or rather, a capacitor inside the power unit exploded (I discovered it later, head blown open like some angry cartoon character, when I took it home and opened it up). My mind began to go into nightmarish flashbacks. Then I remembered: this unit, manufactured in the US, ran on 110 volts, where as Sri Lankan mains were 220 volts. It did have a voltage selector switch, but the voltage stabilizer at home (UPS units were not yet a thing -- we were still trying to protect our delicate machines from voltage fluctuations) was built to take in 220v and output 110v (will not go into this tangent). I had forgotten this fact when I took the thing to the shop. But the technician, unperturbed, casually fanned away the white smoke with his palm, set the selector to 220V and hit the power switch again. The machine booted up perfectly (except, that is, for the original fault which I brought it in for). It seems the 220V circuit within the power unit was unaffected. The device continued to work on 220V. Not sure why I shared this, but seeing capacitors in the context of computer circuitry always brings up this memory. It also brings up remnants of the computer-failure related PTSD that I grappled with for many years until laptops came along. Not sure whether it was the knowledge that the new devices primarily operated on DC battery power, or if the new clamshell shape broke some association my brain had created between large, cubic computing devices, and danger.
cainxinth 2y ago
> Now, electricity is not the boogeyman: you can open a power supply safely, you just have to be aware of the dangers inside. First, never open a running power supply: if you accidentally touch something at high voltage, you could die. Fortunately it wasn’t fatal, but I stupidly did that as a kid. It was my first PC build (an Athlon Thunderbird system) and it was crashing. I fixed the problem by adjusting the PSU voltage rails with a screwdriver while the system was running so I could see the changes in the BIOS. Not my smartest decision.
throwme0827349 2y ago
>> You find yourself in a dark house. You search your person and find nothing but a debit card and a luminescent tablet. Staring into the ceaseless abyss, suddenly you remember: you have parts to acquire for your new computer. This is obviously the cheap simulation that the Muskian overlords will put me in when I have outlived my usefulness... or perhaps they already have? (-᷅_-᷄)
nkotov 2y ago
I recently did something similar with a iMac G3. It was pretty fun to relieve some of my childhood past. We didn't have an iMac at home but we did at our school computer lab and the bright colors made the computer feel not only approachable but also fun. There's still a pretty active PPC community out there by the way.
saagarjha 2y ago
I understand the fun that comes with retrocomputing, but if you actually want to fix bugs, surely emulation would do the job?

237 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

$50 is decent enough for the case alone. The penguin may not be disgraced yet, I wonder if you can boot linux on it. I know gentoo and a lot of other distros support powerpc

tambourine_man 2y ago
There was Yellow Dog Linux, back then.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  Fun fact yum comes from yellow dog
classichasclass 2y ago
IME NetBSD or OpenBSD are better supported options on New World Macs. I run NetBSD/macppc on a G4 Mac mini and it "just works" (tm).
- SpecialistK 2y ago
  OpenBSD seems to be the choice due to pre-compiled 3rd party packages. But I'm sure NetBSD works well too, and may even perform a little better?

bitwize 2y ago

I've got a bit set to try and revive my old G4. I want to see if I can boot MorphOS on it.

bookofjoe 2y ago
My 2004 17" PowerBook G4 starts right up. But it can't do much.

linguae 2y ago

I have a slightly older Power Mac G4, a 350MHz "Yikes!" PCI Power Mac G4 from 1999 (https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/ https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/) that I purchased in 2009 for $40 while I was a senior at Cal Poly. The reason I got it for only $40 was because it had a broken hard drive, but the sellers didn't know that. I was able to replace the hard drive with one that was given away by Cal Poly's computer science department, which sometimes gave away old computer parts. I also replaced the non-working optical drive with a new DVD+RW drive, and I upgraded the RAM; IIRC, it has 640MB RAM. Even though the computer was already obsolete in 2009 (I used a 2006 Core Duo MacBook as my daily driver, which ran circles around the old Power Mac G4), it was a capable machine that could run Mac OS X Leopard and could handle the Web of that era, even YouTube videos. Eventually, sometime around 2013 the Web became too much for my Power Mac G4, but it remains a very nice machine for Mac OS 9 and early Mac OS X retrocomputing. I now have faster PowerPC Macs in my collection (a 1GHz PowerBook G4 and a 1.25GHz Mac Mini G4), but my Power Mac G4 is the fastest machine in my collection that could run the classic Mac OS without any modifications, and it is also the fastest Mac in my collection that has expansion slots. I'm keeping an eye on 2019 Mac Pro prices (I own a 2013 Mac Pro, which I purchased refurbished in 2017 and used as my daily driver until 2022, when I switched to a Ryzen 3900 build). I love the aesthetic, but they're pricey since they are still quite capable Macs despite the transition to ARM. Once they drop to under $500, I plan to buy one and add it to my collection. Update: I found my old blog post about my Power Mac G4: https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-power-mac-g4.html https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-power-mac-...

dijit 2y ago
I also have a "trash can" mac, and I'm not sure what to do with it. It runs linux great, and with 12 cores, 32G of RAM- it could be an extremely capable server. If not for the minuscule SSD. It also draws a fair amount from the wall (98W~), which is probably the dual GPU's not having power control with Linux. If only Thunderbolt 2 drive enclosures would come down in price a little. Eitherway, I share your enthusiasm for the Intel "cheese grater" Mac Pros', those have got to be effectively e-waste to most people soon and I'd love to hoard some for myself.

cowfarts 2y ago

It's funny I'm about to go back the other direction - abandoning Mac at home to return to the Penguin. After over 15 years I find myself using Windows and I hate it. What did they do to it? I used to love windows. The UX is nauseating. Little unseen action items that scramble your screen. Slowly, Apple is doing the same thing to MacOS. I never really left Linux, kept it on the desktop, but I got comfortable with the nice Mac hardware and Office suite. But now? Vomit.

dijit 2y ago

Had a lot of fun reading that. I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to technology, truth be told there's a certain rose tinted nostalgia that I get from thinking about early 00's technology. It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy- that anything related to actual computation or internet was jank and slow, but it had a whiff of a hopeful future about it. Every PC upgrade made things more snappy back then... Now I dread upgrades. Hey ho. It's endearing to know that one more bit of early 00's technology has been given a new lease on life. Would be cool to write some native software for it!

xoa 2y ago
This painfully speaks to me, though on the hoarding front I was convinced to get rid of certain old stuff and now I honestly regret giving up my old Bondi Blue PM G3 400. But on a more recent note I do still have an original Mac Pro and recently had reason to set it up again with 10.6 Server. And firing that up and getting back in really hit me like a ton of bricks, yeah there are all sorts of capabilities available now on the newest systems, but the UX there was just so much more pleasant in a number of tiny ways. You've also said it well, in fact I'd go further and say there was far more then a mere "whiff" of a hopeful future. I looked forward very much to each new release, with concrete useful improvements and the promise of more. In retrospect that was actually the pinnacle of Apple's (genuinely quite decent and promising) server efforts, of a potential alternate world line where they positioned themselves as a strong solution for running things without internet dependencies and subscriptions required. The MP continued to iterate along reliably and nicely until 2010, at which point it died off as a focus at Apple with absolutely agonizing slowness, and with it the dream of a continued upward progression in market support for value oriented hardware capabilities beyond what Apple themselves deigned to offer. Sigh.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
I’m sure that snappiness is possible in modern software, but nobody really seems to pursue it outside of hyper-minimal Linux desktops which aren’t everybody’s cup of tea. Not that GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc on modern machines are bad exactly, but you definitely feel a considerable amount of extra latency everywhere vs. e.g. a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 or OS X 10.2-10.4, which drags the experience down. I’m sure some of degree of latency increase is unavoidable thanks to all of the layers involved in the Linux stack as well as compositing and all that, but I’d bet that there’s a considerable amount that could be optimized away if there were a concerted effort to do so.

LeoPanthera 2y ago

The MDD is the last Macintosh capable of natively running Mac OS 9. (Although, only just. It came with a special build that was just for the MDD.) The fans in it are also astoundingly loud, and was often given the nickname of the "wind tunnel" Mac, because of the holes in the front.

masswerk 2y ago
Allegedly, there was yet another model after this, which wasn't advertised publicly, sold exclusively to creative professionals. (Mostly because of Quark XPress, which took years and years to transition to OS X, which also opened a large window of opportunity for InDesign to become the new standard.) But I have no reliable source for this.
- mrpippy 2y ago
  Once the G5 came out (without support for booting OS 9 bare-metal) they continued selling special config of the MDD for another year.

classichasclass 2y ago

The FW400 MDDs are great for OS 9. I bought my dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 new specifically because it could still boot 9.2.2. Later I put a 1.8GHz Sonnet upgrade in it, and it's still my main Mac OS 9 development system. It also still sounds like a windtunnel.

geerlingguy 2y ago
I was able to find a decent high CFM main system fan that... still sounds like a wind tunnel, but only a little. I remember my Dad had the first G5 with the new thermal architecture, with everything blowing through the front cheese grater grill. That was much better for the components, and blissfully quiet at idle at least.

news_to_me 2y ago

Funny timing, I also bought a Mac today - an SE/30. Looking forward to fixing it up.

foobar1962 2y ago
You'll need a case cracker and a tool specifically to de-energise the CRT: that's the killer part.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  A long flat nose screwdriver is actually recommended in Apple's manuals. Just... don't touch the metal part, and maybe consider wearing some insulating gloves.
- news_to_me 2y ago
  Yeah it’s good general advice to always discharge the CRT. Although… the flyback transformer on most of these Macs has a bleeder resistor, so I skip it when I’m lazy now.
classichasclass 2y ago
Congrats. Recap first - they're probably already shot. Once it's in working order, they're great little workhorses. In undergraduate, the local Mac fileserver was a very hardworking SE/30. I managed to loot its entire contents before they decommissioned it.
- news_to_me 2y ago
  Yeah, I’ve done it once already, hopefully this time I can do it a little cleaner. Nice, any goodies you remember from that hoard?
  - classichasclass 2y ago
    Quite a bit. I posted them to the gopher server (appropriate, as it was accessible via Gopher and AFP): gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu

deleted 2y ago

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otterpro 2y ago

I bought a PowerMac G3 (from ebay, about 15 years ago) and while it was not very powerful, the thing was just fun to work with. I ran Linux and had added all kinds of PCI cards like old analog TV tuner card and SATA RAID card to run it as NAS. And the case was very beautiful. I'm not sure how they did it, but Apple and Steve Jobs made plastic look very pleasing to the eyes. Afterward, I also saw someone's PowerMac G4 in person and that thing looked incredibly nice, especially the mirror finish. These macs looked better in real life than in photos. I never got the G4, and I wish I still had that G3.

Gracana 2y ago
Beige tower, desktop, or the blue and white tower? I always wanted a B&W G3, my friend('s parents) had one and it was a beautiful machine. I had the desktop "beige G3" and I ran it for a long time. Added a 433MHz G4 accelerator, overclocked the bus/memory, ran some software to allow me to use later versions of OS X, installed a radeon 9100 (I think it was) GPU that I flashed to make it run on mac hardware. It was my main machine in the early 2000s, up until I built a core duo machine to run linux. I have very fond memories of Macs of that era.

SpecialistK 2y ago

The late PowerPC-era Macs are really fun to play with, because they're an interesting blend of modern niceties like USB and Ethernet but are limited with how old most software is. There's still a scene of people working on bringing newer versions of GCC and other *nix utilities to Tiger or Leopard, working with the pre-release PPC betas of Snow Leopard, and trying to keep online services working despite aging TLS versions and retired APIs. Compiling takes forever until it fails with an obscure C11 error or missing C library features. And that makes for a fun, if often frustrating, challenge. But PPC32 Linux support is quickly falling off. Gentoo isn't just used because it's fun to leave your lampshade iMac G4 compiling a kernel for days, but because it's one of the few distros still supporting the platform. There's unsupported testing repos for Debian (and maybe Ubuntu?) plus the up-and-coming Adelie. Otherwise your best bet is OpenBSD - FreeBSD and NetBSD usually lack precompiled ports, and FreeBSD has announced the next major release will almost definitely drop 32 bit PPC. The 64 bit G5 systems are much better supporte. I'm pretty sure they can boot ppc64le that many distros target. They're also even more modern - the final models had PCIe, SATA, and up to 16GB of DDR2 RAM. Sadly there's nothing modern about the power efficiency, nor the self-destructing water cooling system.

seabrookmx 2y ago
The G5 doesn't have full little-endian support and to my knowledge can _not_ boot standard ppc64le kernels (which are targeted at the POWER8+ ISA). The only big endian stuff I could find when I tried to put Linux on my G5 was 32-bit, which does run on the G5 but likely means it's Linux support dies with its older PPC Mac brethren.
- SpecialistK 2y ago
  Oh, pardon my mistake! I've always wanted a G5 but have neither the space nor electrical capacity for one.
  - seabrookmx 2y ago
    They are definitely power hogs. And slow.. Core 2 era Intel machines run circles around them. But their obscurity just makes them kind of neat!

CursedSilicon 2y ago

Hey, that's me! (in the Discord screenshot) I think I took the PRAM battery and hard drive out because both were dead. But the RAM I cannot remember what happened, either me or someone else might've scavenged it for another project

WorldPeas 2y ago

Just a trick out there for the pram-frusturated, on my very own G4 pinstripe I was able to get it working without a (correct) battery, instead alligator-clipping on a pack of 3 triple a batteries. Worked like a charm (Connecting three AAA batteries in series [1.5V + 1.5V + 1.5V] provides a total of 4.5V, slightly exceeding the required 3.6V but it did work, and for a while). RIP if you want to revive a TIbook battery though.

piltdownman 2y ago
You can just hold down <apple>+<option>+<P>+<R> at boot and let it play the boot sound a few times before releasing. This will reset the PRAM battery, and allow it to boot to desktop with a working monitor if the PRAM battery is flat.

masswerk 2y ago

Regarding the loud power supply fan of the G4 MDD: Apple actually had a free of charge replacement program for the power supply. The replacement was somewhat less noisy, but still loud, mostly a (rather subtle) change in frequencies than anything else.

WoodenChair 2y ago

If you're looking for a late PPC Mac to run esoteric PPC operating systems or PPC Mac stuff, the MDD G4 is a great machine if you need dual processors, expandability, and more than 1 GB of RAM. But if you don't, you're much better off getting a Mac mini G4. I'm biased because I have a hobby business selling SSD upgraded ones running a hacked Mac OS 9 [0]. But compared to the MDD G4, the Mac mini G4: - Uses a fraction of the energy - Takes up a fraction of the space - Largely can run the same operating systems - Is much quieter (as the article alludes to, the MDD G4 is loud) - For single core can actually be faster going all the way up to 1.5 GHz (MDD can go there with an accelerator) - Has more integrated parts so has less parts that can fail There are some cons to the G4 mini versus the MDD G4 though: - Almost no expandability - Limited to 1 GB of RAM - No dual processors - The hacked version of Mac OS 9 needs USB sound and some models can have some display incompatibilities at high resolutions But for the vast majority of applications these don't matter much. 0: https://os9.shop https://os9.shop

cmiller1 2y ago
I'd say the best PPC Mac will depend on exactly what you want to do on it. Fastest that can natively run OS 9 with full driver support is going to be the MDD. Best low cost and low space for tinkering is going to be the mini with the caveats you mentioned. Best price to performance on the used market for PPC OS X software is probably an iMac G5. Absolute best performance for PPC OS X stuff is going to be the PowerMac G5. Honorable mention to the eMac, which can be be found for ~$100, 1ghz combo drive models and below can natively run OS 9 with full driver support or you can go with up to the 1.42 ghz model which is going to be similar to the fastest G4 minis, and comes with a beautiful built in CRT, with the caveat that it takes up as much space as a CRT.
skyyler 2y ago
Any plans on doing a PowerBook edition?
- WoodenChair 2y ago
  No, it's just a hobby and I'm way too far into this niche having purchased the particular parts for the mini G4 in bulk. Plus there is the built-in know-how of having done nearly 100 of these refurbishments/upgrades that I don't have the time to build up for another model.

dartharva 2y ago

Man, those G3 and G4 Power Macs always look so cool.. are PC cases in that design available in the market? I'd love to build a PC that looks like this.

bwood 2y ago
Some people take the old cases from defunct macs and modify them for modern hardware. Here's a shop [0] that sells conversion kits for them. Here are some "sleepers" that people have built over the years [1,2,3] [0] https://thelaserhive.com/product-category/powermac-g4-conversion-kits/ https://thelaserhive.com/product-category/powermac-g4-conver... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1gva2ft/power_mac_g4_build_hackintosh/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1gva... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/18715sn/powermac_g4_sleeper/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1871... [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/t7tzzb/m1_converted_g4_imac_fully_functional/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/t7tz...

hajimuz 2y ago

> For a while now, I have been working intermittently on the Wii U Linux kernel. In December, for reasons that aren’t important right now3, I turned my attention towards fixing KVM on the Wii U, but in order to fix it, I needed to figure when and why it broke, and the easiest way I could think to do that was with a PowerMac. Got surprised by every sentence. Pure hacking for joy.

waltercool 2y ago

[dead]

abruzzi 2y ago

I still have a MDD, but to be honest I don't use it that often. Korg made a PCI card called OasysPCI that was a synthesizer, DSP, and sound card. They never supported the Windows 2000 driver model or the move the OS X, so I needed the fastest desktop with PCI and OS 9.

peblos 2y ago

> Capacitors can hold charge for a long time, so no touchy. It probably wouldn’t kill you, because capacitors don’t actually store that much energy9, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t kill you, so, no touchy! I'm recalling the time I was trying to load a "backed up" game on my original Playstation using the disc swap [0] method while the chassis was open. Since I had the top lid off, I had to hold the disc tray closed button for it to spin up. While looking away to pick up the other disc my pinky moved and touched a capacitor and had me on the receiving end of a massive zap. I've never touched a capacitor since, thank goodness. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDopEevII3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDopEevII3o

voidUpdate 2y ago
I was once messing around with disassembling a digital camera, and accidentally touched the flash capacitor, which gave me a big shock, both figuratively and literally. I've also not touched anything that spicy since.

lmpdev 2y ago

RE: the power filter caps It might be somewhat more ethical redacting this, some things are just better left alluded to I myself have taken apart CRTs and microwaves, but learning these things should be done by reading media with all attention paid to safety (a specific tutorial on testing and discharging caps), not a quick aside in an unrelated blog post You didn’t say anything wrong, but it might be wise to lessen the word count while also protecting (the potentially vulnerable) people that may read your post Quite a lot of people with intellectual disabilities and/or on the spectrum do teardowns/e-waste (there are even charities here in Brisbane Australia), it’s similar to the old journalist code of ethics on carefully omitting information related to suicides, sometimes it’s wiser to not say anything at all, than it is to say the technically correct thing

mouse_ 2y ago
Self-censoring discussion of electronics is not going to make people who are going to be handling electronics anyways safer.

hliyan 2y ago

The paragraph about capacitors brought back some strange memories: around 1989, my father, for reasons still unfathomable, decided to purchase an IBM XT clone. I say unfathomable because we (myself, my mother and two siblings) were in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where at the time there was virtually nothing useful we could do with a computer, while my father was stationed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he worked. Perhaps he just got a good deal (we weren't in any way rich) and decided to ship one back home. I was 10, my brother was 15 and my sister was 7. For some reason, I ended up playing with the device the most -- playing the occasional game of Karateka and Digger, writing small amounts of BASIC to do math, draw shapes or make sounds over its very rudimentary speaker, and sometimes creating joke certificates using a program called Certificate Maker. There were other programs among the stack of 5 1/4 floppy disks my father sent home, but I couldn't figure out what they were for. One day, the DOS prompt intermittently started spitting out an error when I tried to load a program from a disk: "Ready? Abort? Ignore?" (I know the common one goes "Abort? Retry? Fail?" but this version of DOS, whatever it was, had a different verbiage). This would happen on and off for a few weeks, until that fateful day when I sat in front of the computer, toggled the power switch at the back of the system unit as I always did, and instead of the familiar "A:\>", I was greeted with a blank screen, then a smell of expensive plastic burning, and finally a plume of white smoke out the back of the system unit. As a naturally anxiety prone 10-year old in charge of the most expensive device in the house, I froze in sheer panic for what felt like 5 minutes. I switched the thing off and told no one. When my father finally returned, I sent word through my brother. I was not punished or admonished as anticipated. He (my father) opened up the device (I could have done it myself -- the metal casing opened up with a hinge, much like a hood/bonnet of a car), and discovered that a mouse was responsible. Not a pointing device -- the machine didn't have one -- but a rodent. It had squeezed in through an air vent and had chewed on a few cables. It was when it chewed through a grey data ribbon that the machine had started stuttering "Ready? Abort? Ignore?". But the day after the mouse chomped on a power cable, it exploded. Or rather, a capacitor inside the power unit had exploded. The unit was never repaired. Sri Lanka did not have the parts or the personnel at the time. My second computer, which again, my father brought down some years later, was a 386. This unit served me well for several years with only occasional hiccups that could be remedied by swapping out an expansion card or a hard disk. On one such occasion, I took the system unit (now a vertical tower instead of a bulky, horizontal slab) to be looked at by a technician in town (Sri Lanka now had the personnel). He dutifully plugged it in, connected a keyboard, monitor and a mouse (mice had arrived) and hit the power switch. And it exploded. Or rather, a capacitor inside the power unit exploded (I discovered it later, head blown open like some angry cartoon character, when I took it home and opened it up). My mind began to go into nightmarish flashbacks. Then I remembered: this unit, manufactured in the US, ran on 110 volts, where as Sri Lankan mains were 220 volts. It did have a voltage selector switch, but the voltage stabilizer at home (UPS units were not yet a thing -- we were still trying to protect our delicate machines from voltage fluctuations) was built to take in 220v and output 110v (will not go into this tangent). I had forgotten this fact when I took the thing to the shop. But the technician, unperturbed, casually fanned away the white smoke with his palm, set the selector to 220V and hit the power switch again. The machine booted up perfectly (except, that is, for the original fault which I brought it in for). It seems the 220V circuit within the power unit was unaffected. The device continued to work on 220V. Not sure why I shared this, but seeing capacitors in the context of computer circuitry always brings up this memory. It also brings up remnants of the computer-failure related PTSD that I grappled with for many years until laptops came along. Not sure whether it was the knowledge that the new devices primarily operated on DC battery power, or if the new clamshell shape broke some association my brain had created between large, cubic computing devices, and danger.

cainxinth 2y ago

> Now, electricity is not the boogeyman: you can open a power supply safely, you just have to be aware of the dangers inside. First, never open a running power supply: if you accidentally touch something at high voltage, you could die. Fortunately it wasn’t fatal, but I stupidly did that as a kid. It was my first PC build (an Athlon Thunderbird system) and it was crashing. I fixed the problem by adjusting the PSU voltage rails with a screwdriver while the system was running so I could see the changes in the BIOS. Not my smartest decision.

throwme0827349 2y ago

>> You find yourself in a dark house. You search your person and find nothing but a debit card and a luminescent tablet. Staring into the ceaseless abyss, suddenly you remember: you have parts to acquire for your new computer. This is obviously the cheap simulation that the Muskian overlords will put me in when I have outlived my usefulness... or perhaps they already have? (-᷅_-᷄)

nkotov 2y ago

I recently did something similar with a iMac G3. It was pretty fun to relieve some of my childhood past. We didn't have an iMac at home but we did at our school computer lab and the bright colors made the computer feel not only approachable but also fun. There's still a pretty active PPC community out there by the way.

saagarjha 2y ago

I understand the fun that comes with retrocomputing, but if you actually want to fix bugs, surely emulation would do the job?