The tower form factor may be a thing of the past, at least until the new Mac Pro shows up next year, but for years, if you needed the most powerful and flexible machine money could buy, the Power Mac was the only way to go.
For almost five years, the heart of the Power Mac was the PowerPC G4 chip. Starting in 1999 it clocked at just 350 MHz, but by the time the Power Mac G4 line was retired, a tower with dual 1.42 GHz CPUs could be ordered. In that time frame, things like Gigabit Ethernet, SuperDrives, and Wi-Fi became mainstream.
I have a soft spot for all Macs from the PowerPC G4 era – back when Apple wasn’t boring – and the various models of Power Mac G4 aren’t exceptions. I can’t really explain why I find PowerPC G4 Macs so appealing, even to this day – all I know is that I am dead-set on collecting a number of them, especially those I couldn’t ever afford when they were new.
If I were to compare two architectures, PPC and x86, the x86 architecture was overall faster from a users perspective. It didn’t matter if you were running BeOS, Yellowdog, or even apple’s own MacOS-X internal versions. everything was faster on a PC, for the most part at least.
I’ll see if I can get permission to post some userland videos of the difference mhz to mhz I did back in 1998/1999.
I owned a macMini g4 from 2005 to 2007 and the PPC experience was not exactly great: it was overall slow, compilers were not optimised for PPC and would produce binaries which required a lot of CPU power. Simply running a flash applet inside a browser would send the CPU to 100% and the fan to take-off level. VLC would struggle to render any video with resolution higher than standard DVD. During the long life on 10.4 tiger I switched to an intel iMac and it was night and day: same software huge performance gap.
That explains why that one guy always said in his podcasts that Flash always uses 100% CPU while I didn’t had that experience. He is a Mac user!
Yeah the PowerPC G4 was pretty terrible even then, and today it shows even more.
You don’t collect these to actively use them!
Sad to say, but very true. I got rid of my G4 mac mini a few weeks back. I occasionally booted it up with FreeBSD 10, but without pkg binaries and freebsd-update support, it meant compiling all the base and ports from scratch which took days. And when done, it was slow as anything. While it certainly had some nostalgic value, it was a power-hungry paperweight in practice.
I used to have the same feelings… but honestly, I came to a realization a few years ago:
* Apple hardware doesn’t age well… *lots* of failures. (cap plague, BGA, etc)
* Spare parts are generally *very* over-priced to this day.
* PowerPC OS X is pretty boring. MacOS 9 is more interesting to run on these machines.
* Expandability sucked.
Redirect your Vintage PowerPC Apple fondness to the upcoming RISC-V hardware 😀