hckrnws
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.
It's always bothered me that Apple has so little backwards compatibility. I suppose that's why Windows is used by most of the corporate world for "reliability" (more reliable than Apple), and "ease of use" (people don't want to learn command line for Linux). It's just the mid option
The incentives are very different (or used to be).
Microsoft was selling software and needed that software to work. Making it work in as much hardware as possible was a good thing.
Apple was selling hardware and needed customers to upgrade that hardware over time.
Microsoft sells hardware now too, and cares more about the cloud. So, they are not so much about deep compatibility anymore.
Apple's built their entire company on dropping backwards compatibility. It's how they've maintained their agility for so long, despite being one of the largest companies on the planet.
I am prone to defend them, but they do it in a sensical way (most of the time), I plugged in a G3 whose hard drive was last written to when I was playing hopscotch and when I connected it to wifi it had an official update patch ready for me. They aren't perfect but how many other companies do that. I'd argue that their unflinchingness to move on hardware-wise, and long software support is what gave them success.
Yeah imo they support backwards compatibility where it matters and their hardware is useful for longer as a result. They’re also not afraid to drop it when it’s important to do so.
Alas they didn't become one of the largest companies on the planet because of how they treated their macOS userbase.
Especially nowadays it seems their biggest asset became that they produce good PC-hardware on such a high economics of scale that they're almost unreachable in build-quality...
> Alas they didn't become one of the largest companies on the planet because of how they treated their macOS userbase.
I’m not so sure. We love to complain about Apple, but I don’t see many old timer Mac users now extolling the virtues of Windows. It’s dangerous extrapolating one’s own observations to the world at large, so maybe I’m wrong?
> We love to complain about Apple, but I don’t see many old timer Mac users now extolling the virtues of Windows.
This might be true, but macOS in general is not what made Apple one of the largest companies on the planet.
That's not about complaining, it's about correlation and causation. It's like saying Apple's Wi-Fi routers must be the best because Apple became one of the largest companies on the planet.
I'd say without the iOS ecosystem they would be a well-respected company in the premium tier of their industry, like Dyson or B&O.
I would say that counterintuitively, it’s a factor in the Mac’s strong indieware/botique software scene, which has been going for decades now. Most devs in that camp keep up with the platform changes and those who don’t get swept away, opening up space for someone else to fill that niche.
Can you elaborate further on what software project/products/companies you are referring to?
A couple of long-standing small Mac-focused companies that come to mind are Panic and The Omni Group, which have been building high quality software since the days of classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP, respectively and are among the fastest to adopt new things coming out of Apple.
They've started to drop the ball, but Apple also was really good at simplifying things to the point that its infamous "just works" slogan was apt.
I switched to mac circa 2003 and reliably connecting to wifi was simple, clean, and intuitive. This was the height of the shitshow that was wireless networking on windows, where half the time windows would fight with the vendor software, etc.
I was even more shocked when I hit the "advanced" button and there was full and working advanced BSD networking settings cleanly laid out, from overriding IP/netmask/router, 802.1X, etc. Windows made it difficult and frustrating to apply these kinds of settings, because they wanted to hide it from the user.
This is not entirely true - they’ve invested quite a bit in maintaining backwards compatibility at least hardware side through various emulation or translation layers : first during the ppc/x86 migration then more recently with the x86 to arm shift.
They're a phone device manufacture, which is how they became the first or second largest company, depending on how the tariffs blow.
Mac and macOS are afterthoughts at this point.
They have somewhere near 10% share of the laptop market and the new Apple Silicon stuff absolutely cooks. For an afterthought, they're an exceptionally well-built and well-loved one that people enjoy using.
This isn’t true. They support old platforms for a long time.
At some point you need to move on. Can’t support ancient platforms forever.
I'm writing this on a ten year old Mac with specs in line with what I see on dell.com as still available in new systems, with Apple still delivering some software updates yearly. All the apps I use have been available in both Intel and Apple Silicon flavors. I'm not sure how much more I can expect from Apple / the Apple ecosphere.
...what Mac are you using then, again? Because I have a 2017(!!!!) MacBook Pro that's completely unusable due to its terrible performance and fans going at 100% all the time.
Apple platforms only had command line after NeXT reverse acquision, it isn't as if A/UX was a huge success, so it is kind of ironic see that mentioned.
It was specially clear in the early days of MS-DOS versus Mac OS.
> It's always bothered me that Apple has so little backwards compatibility.
Hear, hear!
Outside the corporate world's devices, I insist that my personal computing choices bring me either high confidence or personally useful knowledge/growth, or I will ban the product/company with malice. I banned APPL for foisting the full load of supporting older devices onto me, and MSFT Windows 11 is facing my personal banishment for kicking all older (but perfectly serviceable) hardware to the curb.
I thank the Linux ecosystem every single day.
Apple hates when you do this but they can't stop you: I still have one of the original Intel Core Duo Mac Minis from 2006. I upgraded the HDD at one point and also installed Windows. I use it to run a CNC mill.
> people don't want to learn command line for Linux
The same applies to Windows and Apple's OS.
The point about the command line is that it is there for people who want it. You can use all of them without using the command line.
Doesn't this mainly come down to Macs using weirder architectures while Windows largely stuck to the IBM PC and its clones/descendants?
I'm also seeing more software lately talking about dropping support for Windows 7 or 8 after a certain release.
There's no reason today's macOS couldn't support a Classic environment, like the early releases of OS X. There are a lot of support costs surrounding such an environment, so I don't blame Apple for dropping it.
It supports x86 emulation, for now.
I believe Windows has seen more architectures than Mac OS Classic and OS X combined.
Windows 3rd party software often drops support because Microsoft doesn't support the OS. It could be the desire to use new APIs that aren't included in 7/8 (or soon to be 10), but it's hard to support an operating system as an app vendor that the OS vendor doesn't support.
I always liked VMware's statement that they would support NT4 and above -- like, no you can't.
* I believe Windows has seen more architectures than Mac OS Classic and OS X combined.*
I have never been a Windows user, but I used to keep an eye on it when NT was still the separate business version (pre-Vista) and my NT 4.0 (or was it 3.51?) CD-ROM had x86, MIPS, Alpha and maybe PowerPC support. When things weren’t as clear platform-wise, NT was really a multi-platform system. Since then also x86_64, IA64, ARM64.
CE adds SH3 to the processor list.
And ARM32.
Classic ran as suid root and was a big huge security hole on a multiuser OS. (which is probably why they got rid of it as soon as they could.) There are some more contained emulators of course.
> It's always bothered me that Apple has so little backwards compatibility.
So little? macOS Sequoia is compatible with Macs that are over seven years old [1], macOS Sonoma goes back to 2017 [2].
At that point, it doesn't make much sense for anyone to still be operating these things in a production setting because of power efficiency and lack of RAM - and all Intel macOS machines can be used with even the most cutting-edge Linux distributions anyway if you wish to further extend their service life. If you need a modern Windows though, you'll most likely want to go via a hypervisor because of TPM concerns.
The old PPC clankers, it's a miracle the hardware is still running and they haven't died from bad capacitors, Soldergate or whatever in the time.
Is that good? Windows 11 officially supports computers from 2017 too, Linux way further. Ubuntu 24.04 will happily run on machines over a decade old with no problems.
And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14. PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
> Windows 11 officially supports computers from 2017 too
... assuming they have TPM 2.0, which is far from a given.
> And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14.
Fair point. Apple is indeed more aggressive on backwards compatibility in software... which is both a blessing and a curse. At the very least, it forces app developers to stay at least somewhat current, which means that Apple has far less legacy garbage to drag around - unlike Windows, where Microsoft went through at least half a dozen completely different programming frameworks and paradigms alone relating to "how to draw a window on the screen" which it has to support to this day simply because otherwise the complaints would be endless. And Linux is even worse in that regard.
> PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
If you really have such old software and a need for it... run it on a VM.
MacOS Sonoma only supports a single model from 2017. The iMac Pro. Everything else is left out. Much easier to find a PC from 2017 that has support for TPM 2.0.
Software devs come and go, there's no guarantee the dev will go back and update old software. Just look at the graveyard of abandoned Mac games on Steam. And even if they do, it often means rebuying or worse a subscription just for the sake of running what you already had.
Can I run something like Crysis in VM with good performance? Especially on a completely different architecture like ARM?
Regarding OpenBSD: I don't know if 32 bit PowerPC support will be around for all that long, if one considers how many platforms have been dropped from OpenBSD in the last few years.
Also, it doesn't look like OpenBSD has binary packages for 32 bit PowerPC:
https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.7/packages/
Although I do see packages for OpenBSD 7.6 from last year:
https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.6/packages/powerpc/
There's always NetBSD, though, which has tons of binary packages and which isn't going to be dropping architectures like PowerPC any time soon :)
7.7 isn't out yet, and frequently port builds take a while, so this is unsurprising and shouldn't be taken as a lack of support or impending discontinuation.
OpenBSD still supports the Alpha, which is an even older and rarer (albeit 64-bit) architecture.
It’s wild that OpenBSD still supports the architectures it does. I literally learned how to program on a G4 Mac running OpenBSD back in 2000. I think it was version 3.0 but I don’t really remember. It was a wonderful experience, and I chose OpenBSD because it was the only UNIX-like OS I could get to boot on that machine (I struggled to understand Debian’s esoteric instructions for weeks before I gave up). OpenBSD, by contrast, had essentially the same install program it has to this day. At the time, there were no printed books for OpenBSD, but I read the (surprisingly good) man pages and supplemented with a used copy of the FreeBSD handbook I bought on eBay. Good times.
> It’s wild that OpenBSD still supports the architectures it does have you looed at what NetBSD supports if you count the tier 2 ones?
At least one of the more obscure platforms openbsd supports are often due to someone(one person) willing to step up and do the builds.
I love reading when the luna88k maintainer comes out of the woods a month or two after release to announce that the packages are done building. Realisticly I expect there are a few 88k users. But based on the radio silence I see on the lists it feels like there is one heroic user who really likes openbsd and is willing to make it happen. I find it very inspiring.
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.
Oh, pardon my mistake! I've always wanted a G5 but have neither the space nor electrical capacity for one.
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!
Both Chimera Linux and Adelie Linux have support for 32 bit PPC. They are fresh off the press distros. So, support can still be found.
I mentioned Adelie, but didn't think Chimera supports PPC32 (yet) - the founder used to maintain the PPC32 flavor of Void Linux so it's very possible.
> 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.
Seems to me the trick to enhancing build times would be emulation using modern hardware, no? qemu, etc.
Minor corrections
- Only the G5 *Quad* had PCI-E, all the others were PCI-X (yuck)
The Quad was also the only one to take DDR2 RAM, though did support up to 16GB
All Apple Macs though are PPC64 Big Endian, not ppc64le. This causes no end of problems with software that now assumes "IF PPC = LE"
All of the PowerMac11,2 models that used the dual-core on a single silicon 970MP G5s supported PCIe:
https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=Po...
The quad was just two dual cores in a single chassis, with an unfortunately prone to breaking liquid cooling setup.
I've never understood running PPC Linux on old machines. Unless you're interested in running some of the really weird and esoteric scientific packages, or you're trying to unfuck a machine (which I've used ppclinux for many times lol), I don't get the point?
These machines were built as a package. Both the software and hardware was designed with an ethos in mind. It's bespoke.
I can't tell you what to do with your hardware, but if you want to run old linux, you can just do that in like qemu or something.
I mostly agree, and dual boot Tiger and Leopard on my 1.67GHz PowerBook G4. But just as those OSes aren't very useful outside of novelty (or maybe some older Mac OS games that haven't been ported to a newer platform) so is running a modern Linux distro or BSD on it. The times I've done it, I've done the install, clicked around for a few minutes, and then move on. Sometimes struggling with and overcoming the hassle of installing an OS (or newer version of Bash on 20 year old Mac OS X) is the point. Journey vs destination and all that.
And that OpenFirmware. Telnet to your BIOS?!
It's sort of surprising NetBSD doesn't support it. I thought almost the whole point of NetBSD was that it ran on anything.
My impression is 'the point' is more that NetBSD is a hobby OS which is easier to port to old hardware (so volunteers welcome). Newer commercial boards all run Linux.
It's sad that support for these things always seems to just disappear. All software maintainers have to do is not touch it and not break it, and it would work forever, but no, they can't help themselves. Out of boredom of old things, they drop this... out of convenience, they deprecate that... and out of a refactor, they forget to keep thus... and suddenly, software that once worked fine is now gone. It's up to archivists and tinkerers to constantly fix these mistakes and restore these old platforms.
> All software maintainers have to do is not touch it
That seems okay...
> and not break it
Ah, there's the rub - when you're not actively testing on the platform, because no-one on your team has the relevant pieces around any more, then you don't know whether you've broken it.
And even if you do have the relevant pieces, there's a non-zero cost involved in testing every subsequent release on that environment, and implementing workarounds for every subsequent change or new feature in the future which fails to work on the old hardware, used by ~0.0% of your user base.
It's not just boredom that causes stuff to be dropped, it's when the cost of maintaining compatibility with the old hardware exceeds the benefit of retaining the compatibility.
Unfortunately, I don't think supporting a platform by providing prebuilt binaries is as simple as "just don't touch it". There's no guarantee things will continue to build for the platform, nor that upstream projects won't remove explicit support from their code bases if the effort to maintain it exists.
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!
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.
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.
> 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
Odd thing...
While I agree regarding the snappiness of older OSes, the Mac was for me always a bit of an odd exception.
I started on Macs in the 680x0 era and Mac System 6, and I worked on them through 7.x, 8.x, 9.x and into OS X.
For me, no PowerPC edition of either Classic or OS X ever felt as responsive as Classic on a 680x0 Mac. I narrowly missed out on a Quadra 840 on Freecycle over 15 years ago and still regret it -- that was the fastest 68040 Mac ever made.
NeXTstep was of course originally built on and shipped on 68030 -- it's a CISC native OS. PowerPC Classic was always mostly running emulated 680x0 code.
I read analyses of Mach API calls that explained that calls on RISC were less efficient in register usage or something.
But then, Intel Macs came along. Mac OS X returned to x86 from PowerPC. And suddenly Mac OS X felt snappy again in a way it never did for me on PowerPC.
As an old-time Motorola user I was conflicted about Intel Macs. Macs weren't meant to be PCs. I didn't want Windows on a Mac. But the feeling of using 10.4 on Intel converted me: it felt snappy and responsive in a way Windows NT never did on Intel.
(NT was built on RISC and ported to Intel, the reverse of NeXTstep.)
this matches my experience actually.
I thought I didn't like Apple computers, but in hindsight I remember feeling that the eMac/G5's that I was using at school were clunky and slow compared to the contemporary Windows XP machines.
This was 2005- so XP on period correct hardware was extremely lean in comparison.
I think the latency was a pretty substantial reason for this in retrospect. I did not have nearly the same experience in 2012 when I bought my first Macbook Pro. (which I purchased because it was a UNIX that could run Microsoft Office and our VPN software... and I've been a MacOS user on/off ever since).
I never used a PowerPC Mac, I bought the first new computer they unveiled after the iPhone. But I did go through the Apple Silicon transition, and let me tell you computing is great!
That M1 Macbook Air killed any sort of desire to get an iPad or any other computer for that matter. I'm looking forward to upgrading this year or next year, but somehow even that feels superfluous. Except for RAM. Damn low RAM.
I've actually been pleasantly surprised by how well most Linux stacks work in resource constrained environments.
I have a first-generation Framework - the ones with the shitty Intel CPUs that don't support proper S3 sleep, only the awful "modern standby" - and I often throttle the clock to 400 MHz to save battery. GNOME's performance doesn't degrade at all; the only place it feels "un-snappy" is when starting heavier apps.
I think I may be misremembering, but I got S3 working quite well in both Linux and Windows. This comment from Nirav Patel suggests it should work quite well (although unsupported by Intel as with all other modern Intel CPUs): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31435132
Right now, I have enough small but annoying hardware issues with my Framework laptop that I'm not bothering to improve anything for myself, either software or hardware related. I currently use it only as a desktop, and don't have anything but Windows installed at the moment.
In the past I've always recommended Framework, and I still feel I can't just leave my negative tone above sitting without further comment.
<Start of rant>
All the issues I've had would be trivial fixes, except that I'm not in a country that Framework ships to, and they can't send to anywhere outside that list, or allow freight-forwarding. Even for simple, inexpensive parts. I don't know the reason for this, but I do genuinely trust that it is because of a real problem for them, not just a lack of effort.
Excepting that, I've always had very high-quality, prompt responses. I'm currently waiting until Framework expand their supported countries, I move country again, or I can arrange to send parts to someone else I know who can forward parts on to me.
From soon after purchase, I was silently enduring a rattling fan, and the 1st gen 1TB expansion card overheating issue. Recently, the 1st-gen backup battery design issue has suddenly made itself known to me, and now I'm more pessimistic. It seems all it takes is moving to a non-supported country to turn what was designed to be a repairable laptop, into something less convenient to fix than my previous preferred choice (any of the more repairable, common enterprise laptops).
For anyone living in a supported country, I would still suggest a Framework laptop, but with slightly more hesitation than before. <End of rant>
Linux desktops certainly handle low-resource environments well, particularly compared to Windows, but even so it has some omnipresent elevated latency relative to late 90s/early 00s commercial operating systems, which can be felt even on powerful hardware.
It’s hardly a dealbreaker and not even really a problem (which is probably why it’s still there) but making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use.
Slow CPUs and GPUs work much better on Linux than on Windows, but when the problem is a shortage of RAM, Windows will hold out much longer before grinding to a halt.
In an era of soldered-on RAM, this is becoming a rather annoying problem. Unfortunately, Linux doesn't offer the same APIs Windows does to take preventative action before running out of RAM. Windows' auto-growing page file also makes for a less crashy experience than Linux' static swap partitions (or constant-size pagefile). Plus, Windows comes with memory compression (zram/zswap) out of the box, configured to use both memory compression and disk swap to catch these situations.
I wish Windows wasn't such a slog on the CPU and GPU because making Linux work in low-memory situations is an absolute pain.
> making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use.
When you phrase it like that, I'm actually more surprised Linux suffers from the extra latency. When most software is written to scratch an itch and optimization beyond "works on my machine" is for fun, you'd expect latency to evaporate over time
It’s beyond my realm of expertise so I can’t speak confidently, but my hunch is that many of the responsiveness papercuts are cross-domain in nature, which makes them more difficult to track down and fix (not to mention makes who’s responsible for fixing them more murky).
Another big chunk likely comes down to the tradeoffs all the big DEs have made in favor of making development easier or improving DX. This is understandable but at the same time it would be nice if at least one took a hardline stance towards commiting performance reductions and placed responsiveness as a chief concern, much as the operating systems of yesteryear did.
Gnome and KDE plasma or whatever are horrible steps back in my experience. Laggy or slow loading of content in apps such as their app catalogs or hitching and lockups feel gross on a capable modern system even with 24gb of ram. Windows 11 isn't much better honestly where I relate to the video showing Win2k vs Win11 and apps take forever to load now.
Sure they are pretty looking but so was stuff like Aero which felt faster on worse hardware so what is going on? I feel like around the mid 2000s we went down the path of putting heavy, slow web-like user interfaces into the OS and brought everything down with it in favor of the scalability of DPI and easier (?) development. It's not really the OS either it's the apps. We've been making trade offs at the cost of usability and speed.
Some of the lighter DEs have problems too. Just about all of them take an extra beat or two to display their start menu equivalents for example, which feels like it’s probably a solvable problem considering that systems of yore could do the same with almost no delay on very limited hardware.
I used my 2003ish Power Mac G4 MDD some time around 2014 before giving it to a friend and I noticed how quickly everything responded. Kinda annoyed me how we've regressed in that regard.
> It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy
I'll never forget my first smartphone. Whenever somebody called, it took so long for the screen to turn on, that the other person would often hang up before I could answer. I'd just sit there with a ringing phone in my hand, waiting for its screen to turn on.
I'd really like to know what phone you had but my first attempt to buy one was a Windows based phone. I remember asking them to let me check it out so they grabbed a new one and turned it on...5 minutes later it was still booting.
I deeply miss my Palm m100 and it's snappy interface and ability to run all week on some AAA batteries.
It was Samsung Galaxy Mini 2. I think it was the worst phone that was yet vaguely usable.
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
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.
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.
Any plans on doing a PowerBook edition?
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.
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/) 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-...
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.
> it could be an extremely capable server. If not for the minuscule SSD.
You can get adapters from Apple's custom slot to a standard M.2 form factor, allowing you to use a modern M.2 NVMe drive. As long as you have already installed the firmware update that adds support for NVMe in addition to the AHCI protocol originally used by that machine, there shouldn't be any issues putting in one of today's relatively cheap multi-TB drives. The Mac Pro didn't have the physical space limitations that made some SSD adapters problematic for the laptops.
Admittedly my "trash can" Mac sees little use these days. I thought I'd miss macOS a lot when I switched to Windows in 2022, but it turns out that I could live without it, though I do have a work-issued MacBook Pro, and so in a sense I never truly left the Mac ecosystem. It's kind of hard talking about being a user of one particular OS when I work with Windows, macOS, and Linux weekly and with FreeBSD occasionally.
Regarding the 2019 Mac Pro, I just took a cursory look on eBay for 2019 Mac Pro models, and it appears they are still going for over $1,000. macOS still supports the 2019 Mac Pro, though its days are numbered since Apple usually has a 6-7 year window for supporting Macs.
I believe there are two main reasons why the Mac Pro is still so expensive despite the fact that a M4 Mac Mini would outperform it:
1. RAM. Not only does the 2019 Mac Pro support DIMMs, but it also supports a gigantic amount of RAM: 768GB on models with 8-16 cores, and 1.5TB on models with 24 or 28 cores (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102742). No ARM Mac supports this much RAM. This makes the 2019 Mac Pro a nice machine for very RAM-intensive tasks that require Mac software.
2. The 2019 Mac Pro has expansion slots, though the 2023 Mac Pro also has expansion slots.
In my experience the CPU is actually probably a good chunk of that power draw.
I swapped my trash cans CPU for an E5-2560L v2 I had laying around and I pull like 30-40 from the wall of if I remember right. 20 cores at 1.7GHz. Low and wide, which for my purposes (low grunt container workloads, home assistant, and such) is perfect. 70W TDP compared to the 130W standard six-core CPU.
Thunderbolt is too new to have decent cheap open source cable/accessories available, but too old (and not popular enough when new) to have many actually useful cheap used accessories.
A lot of those old Macs would make decent little random servers if you could attach faster storage or networking without spending a ton.
> It also draws a fair amount from the wall (98W~)
Is that a typo?
No, seems like I'm not alone in the observation: https://kenrockwell.com/apple/mac-pro-late-2013.htm
(I used a kill-a-watt meter on my homelab at some point).
Yeah, note that’s at idle! Under full CPU load mine (12 core) pulls 230 watts. I’ve never stressed the GPUs at all.
Still doesn’t seem like a crazy amount of power! Neat.
There's mSATA (NVMe?) adapters for the trash can Mac Pros. They used to be pretty cheap ~$20. They're just a small pin adapter for the drives.
Those 2019 Mac Pros are never going to go down that low.
- They're forever going to be the fastest Intel Macs, which makes them highly desirable.
- The Mac Pro simply does not sell at volume anymore, unlike the Power Mac G4 which did sell quite well to regular consumers. So they're quite rare.
- Everybody in the market for a Mac Pro knew the Apple Silicon transition was right around the corner, so they probably sold even less than we think. Even rarer.
- The iMac Pro had been out for a little while when those came out. Most people who needed Pro hardware had probably bought an iMac Pro. Even rarer still.
No joke, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple sold less than half a million of those 2019 Intel Mac Pros.
> 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.
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.
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.
Once the G5 came out (without support for booting OS 9 bare-metal) they continued selling special config of the MDD for another year.
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
Self-censoring discussion of electronics is not going to make people who are going to be handling electronics anyways safer.
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.
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.
> 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.
I understand the fun that comes with retrocomputing, but if you actually want to fix bugs, surely emulation would do the job?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>> 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? (-᷅_-᷄)
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.
$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
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).
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?
There was Yellow Dog Linux, back then.
Fun fact yum comes from yellow dog
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.
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.
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.
Funny timing, I also bought a Mac today - an SE/30. Looking forward to fixing it up.
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.
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?
Nice. Among the things other folks have mentioned, you'll probably want to figure out a different cooling fan. My recollection is that the stock fan is annoyingly loud.
Oh hey, I figured I would take a look on thingiverse for a solution, and I found this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4666475
Ooh this looks great
You'll need a case cracker and a tool specifically to de-energise the CRT: that's the killer part.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-conver...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1gva...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/1871...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/comments/t7tz...
I've got a bit set to try and revive my old G4. I want to see if I can boot MorphOS on it.
My 2004 17" PowerBook G4 starts right up. But it can't do much.
Comment was deleted :(
[dead]
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code