Apple

Hello long time no see!
Never been an apple owner but I've always wanted to own one of those. Recent ebay prices range from $300 to more than $400. I am wondering whether it is still worth buying one for $300. I could imagine using it for internet browsing, occasional RDP to windows machine (possible or not?) Maybe photoshop too. How is the performance of G4 1.5GHz with 1.25 GB RAM? Thank ya

RDP will run just fine

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx

It's a nice machine - it has the formfactor of these new netbooks. but consider: getting spare parts will become harder for old mac notebooks - if it breaks.

I've just acquired a "G3 Pismo 400Mhz" and I think it's absolutely great! Running Tiger, 1Gb memory and a 30Gig harddisk.

I'd been considering getting something like that as my first mac, but I am shocked at how well the PowerPC laptops seem to hold their value. On eBay and secondhand sales forums, they tend to go for much more than a new x86 laptop would cost.

People must still consider them to be useful/worthwhile machines, or perhaps long time mac owners never really got into the Wintel style hardware cycle where you upgrade just because something is newer.

kramlq wrote: .... or perhaps long time mac owners never really got into the Wintel style hardware cycle where you upgrade just because something is newer.

Typically Macs cost more hence the psychology of previous investment. You don't get the same kind of attachment with commodity hardware.

For many people being on the bleeding edge isn't the place to be, far better to have a system that is a joy to use.

I doubt you'll be all the happy with the performance of a newer Photoshop but everything else should be fine. Like Porter I still use a Pismo as my only laptop [G4 550mhz + 512mb + 60gb]. It does it's job as web browser, serial console, DVD/Mp3 player, and Wesnoth time waster when I'm waiting for installs to finish in the datacenter.

-Mike

I still use a 12" 1.5 GHz G4 with 1.25 Gb RAM running Tiger as my everyday machine, even though I have a 2.33 GHz 15" MacBook Pro and other, newer machines hanging around.

The 12" form factor is great, particularly if you travel a lot, and the performance is fine for most tasks. At the moment, I have 14 Firefox tabs open, iTunes playing some music, the BBEdit text editor running, and a Photoshop Elements 3 window open, and it is running just fine. I also use Office 2004, Safari, Opera, and a few other apps routinely.

It's a tough little machine, having survived a few hard falls with no consequences besides a few major dents.

The only serious negative about the machine (aside from the fact that it is a little more than four years old) is that it does tend to run hot, and, as a result, the fan runs often -- and loudly. Running things like Flash widgets or Adobe AIR apps (e.g. TweetDeck) seem to kick up the fan activity quite a bit. I am noticing that Flash-intensive web pages are less snappy than I'd like, but they're not too bad yet.

One final point - given the age of the machine, you may need to buy a new battery (appx $120) if you plan on running it untethered. If you can, ask the seller for the number of battery charge cycles and/or the charge capacity. (You can get the info from the "Power" section using the System Profiler program or by running a utility like coconutBattery ). Once a battery gets much beyond 150 cycles, it can lose its ability to hold much of a charge. A new battery for this model will have around 4400 mAh. Anything above 3000 mAh or so will still be fairly useful. Much less than that, and the battery will last less than an hour.

I used to own an iBook G4 1.25GHz and I sold it (300 euros).

I don't think it's a good idea to buy a G4. It's not slow but the response time is not good. Safari and Firefox run ok, but not as smooth as on desktop PC.

For $949 you can get a MacBook featuring a dual core processor, quite good accelerated graphics, and 160Gb hard drive. It can pretty much replace a desktop PC for non computation intensive or gaming applications.

Thanks for all the inputs! Really helpful. I am fine with it being a little slow (not too long ago I was very happy with my Octane2 360, and before that a purple I2.) Also as people mentioned above the form factor of a 12" is attractive. New macbooks are great but they are expensive. Anyway we all love vintage machines dont you? Otherwise we wouldn't hang out here.

@josehill
I can't use firefox to surf without installing flashblock/adblock addons so those web pages should be fine lol

Honestly, unless you get it very cheap (or a song) it is not worth it. 10.5 will be the last OSX to run on them, and the batteries tend to show their age. I still use my PowerBook 15" every now and then, and for most basic tasks it does OK.

However, if small form factor is your thing... you can get a cheapo netbook and put OSX in it, or you can get one of the new 13" unibodys for around $1K (less with academic discount). It is slightly larger but will run circles in terms of CPU, resolution, and battery life.

I always advice against making any significant investment on a product that has been EOL'd. That been said, if the price is cheap... go for it.

R-ten-K wrote: I always advice against making any significant investment on a product that has been EOL'd. That been said, if the price is cheap... go for it.

I agree with R-ten-K on this. If $300 or so is your budget, I think the G4 is a reasonable value, though his point about the performance advantage of a hackintosh laptop or an entry level MacBook is definitely worth considering. Also factor in the price of a new battery for the G4, if needed, and the value proposition relative to an x86 machine decreases quickly.

For example, if the battery for my G4 PowerBook died tomorrow, it would absolutely be worth it for me to spend $120 on a new battery. However, if both died or were somehow lost, and the replacement price for the G4 PowerBook and a good battery were around $500, I'd rather save up and spend the extra money on an x86 MacBook (new or used).

I figure I'll keep using my G4 PowerBook as my workhorse through next Spring or early Summer, and then I'll probably replace it with one of the new unibody 13" MacBook Pros. I was playing with one at the Apple Store a few days ago. A pretty slick machine, it's actually slightly lighter in weight than the 12" G4, although I prefer the G4 display's aspect ratio over the MBP's wider screen.

I have a 12" iBook G4 1.33GHz with 1.5GB RAM that I use in the classroom and at the bedside. It's used mostly for web surfing and Word, and it fills those roles nicely, though it can bog down a bit on flash-heavy pages while videos are running. I paid about $300 for it a year ago. Overall I'm very happy with it - the form factor is great, it's very ergonomic, the wireless reception is good, and it's quite solid. Runs like a Honda Civic - no problems, I just keep a charger nearby, as the battery only lasts about an hour now. It runs X-Plane 7 pretty smoothly, is a decent Photoshop machine if you don't mind the small screen, and can even run Maya 7 pretty well, though the screen is not quite large enough to fit all the GUI elements. A 1.5GHz Powerbook would no doubt be even slicker.

The most important thing for PPC Mac to run a web browser: Skip Flash and load it only when you have to.

1. Firefox -> FlashBlock
2. Safari -> ClickToFlash

Gosh, even my Intel Mac needs this kind of treatment... Flash sucks.

shyouko wrote: Gosh, even my Intel Mac needs this kind of treatment... Flash sucks.

No kidding. What a cycle sucking piece of garbage. People don't seem to care because fast hardware is so cheap these days, but the fact that it takes processor cycles in the billions of hertz to play blurry postage stamp sized crap on YouTube (or obnoxious web advertising - take your pick) makes me want to drive to Adobe and fling a flaming bag of dog poo at their front door.

Sorry, rant over.

Yeah, when a 1.33GHz G4 can't play a 320x240 streaming video without dropping frames, its obvious the code is shit. You could write a more efficient video player in Visual Basic.

Reminds me of that other ubiquitous Adobe app, Reader. Which is no longer called "Acrobat" because apparently it's no longer capable of any actual physical performance. It just lounges around in your system memory, sucking up RAM and cycles like a deadbeat uncle who won't leave your parents' basement. Recent versions are so bad that I've switched to a freeware alternative called Foxit Reader that works the way Acrobat used to - unobtrusively.

I wish some enterprising company would come up with an alternative to Flash player that's actually optimized for the underlying hardware. It can't be that hard!

I always thought these are well sweet machines. Even now. Back then they were too dear, today I run Solaris on a custom-built laptop. Still, would have been nice to own that kind of kit.

ajerimez wrote: I wish some enterprising company would come up with an alternative to Flash player that's actually optimized for the underlying hardware. It can't be that hard!

A G4 has plenty of horsepower to do video w/o any significant issue (probably not HD, but normal 480p stuff should be no problem). The issue is that to get the required performance implies using altivec (or any other SIMD extensions)... and it is nearly impossible to find programmers who understand data parallelism correctly. Media-oriented ISA extensions have been around for over a decade in full force, yet there are still few tools/people who can exploit them properly.

People mock me when I stress the importance of proper technical education, esp. with the increasing levels of complexity in modern computing systems. So it should not be a surprise that a lot of products out there pretty much suck, because a lot of people out there don't know what the heck they are doing... literally.

R-ten-K wrote:

ajerimez wrote: I wish some enterprising company would come up with an alternative to Flash player that's actually optimized for the underlying hardware. It can't be that hard!

... Media-oriented ISA extensions have been around for over a decade in full force, yet there are still few tools/people who can exploit them properly.

I think its only going to get worse. Assembly isn't really considered important enough to teach anymore, and universities often teach virtual machine based languages like Java from day one of the course now. So the correlation between code written and what happens at lower levels is not something future programmers are very aware of anymore.

Having said that, I had always assumed the specific problem with flash playback was that it was so highly compressed compared with other formats we are used to. Half an hour of watchable quality video in less than 100Mb is quite impressive if you consider what the size of an uncompressed avi would be.

kramlq wrote: I think its only going to get worse.

Agreed. The problem also occurs when people use libraries and have no idea how they are implemented. Sure "X does Y", but also "X does Y better if you also do Z".

I am amazed at the level of the knowledge of some people who claim to be "IT professionals".

According to a developer at Adobe I came across, the biggest issue with Flash isn't video compression/decompression. As R-ten-K indicates, the G4 is more than capable of handling that, particularly if the Altivec unit is recruited. Believe it or not, Adobe has done a lot of optimization on the basic Flash rendering engine, and, particularly as of version 10, the raw video capability is noticeably faster and leaner than earlier versions, even on PowerPC.

According to this developer, the major issue stems from the addition of special features that paying customers have been asking for, like comment and annotation layers (e.g. those annoying YouTube bits), which ramp up RAM and CPU requirements for each video. Embed a few such vids on a single page, and you start running into trouble pretty quickly. Throw in a bunch of wacky Web 2.0 widgets and javascripts, and even a fast machine can struggle.