A)There’s a TON of dead air space in a Mac Mini
B)the main board would fit nicely where the DVD drive was in the iMac…this would end up being an ‘easy’ project, based on modern tech being so much smaller, except
C) Interfacing with the monitor would take a little doing…pretty sure it’s not HDMI
I think for a practical machine the screen would just be too low-res these days, I'd put a more modern LCD in there too if I could although if it's anything like the PowerBooks of that era it'll be a bit of a faff.
I did this about 6 years ago with a NUC, many hours of work went into it. Spent so many hours converting the display cable into a dvi connector so any computer could be fit in. Replacing the screen panel was beyond my skill at the time, the springs in the neck and odd data & power cables make that a real pain.
I remember the whole 'megahurtz myth' being a thing at around that time. Apple swore blind that its 1.4 GHz G4 machines were comparable to an equivalent, far higher clock speed P4. I didn't know about pipelining, OOE, and vector extensions to be able to judge that at the time. Was it true? The P4 was a very limited, long pipelined chip, but I don't know what the G4 was actually like in comparison.
One thing that I do remember about those machines is that they were massively memory bandwidth limited though, and iirc took PC100 ram at a time when everyone else had PC166 at least...
Yes a G4 was quite a bit faster than a P4 clock for clock, especially on floating point and vector operations and used quite little power too.
You can go watch the annual videos where they show photoshop benchmarks running faster on the G3, G4 and G5s. But Intel did take the lead on occasion and kept up mostly. XP also felt faster in UI than early Mac OS X versions, although it did more and improved later on.
This is absolutely wonderful, excellent concept and execution. I've been tempted to use a Power Mac G5 case for a modern build running helloSystem (a Tiger-ish skinned FreeBSD distribution) but this is far cooler!
In my opinion the '00s produced some absolutely wonderful visual designs across Apple's product range. The fifth generation iPod, first generation iPhone, and pretty much all the iMacs and MacBooks from 2002-2008 are just really nice objects to look at and touch. This is true for the software as well, Tiger remains to this day my favourite interface for any OS ever and I think it's a real shame you can't skin modern macs to look like 2005-era macs!
Tiger was the most pleasing OS I’ve used from a visual perspective. It was also peak skeuomorphic design. I miss Scott Forstall’s influence in every Apple product since he’s been gone.
I may have talked to you about this, but I feel the same, iOS 7 also absolutely marred the sustained & graphical performance of the OS via the over reliance on increasingly n-dimensional neon or parallax bullshit whereas skeuomorphic design needed a lift but was nominally perfect by way of consistency and hardware demands. I miss Forstall a lot. I even feel their hardware today is designed a bit more sloppily. Idk, people cheered the departure of Ive or Forstall.
Really other than Tim whom I don’t care for — Craig Federighi is cog incarnate. Software has only had one good fucking release on iOS since 7 — that being iOS 12. I can’t even imagine how pernicious the internal influence has been on a normative scale adjusted toward “Apple design and UX of Forstall”
I’m afraid that iOS release quality has always been terrible garbage for me even if I liked Scott Forstalls design aesthetics.
I have had an iOS device since iPhone launched. October of 2012 my iPhone backups made locally and in iCloud could not be restored due to corruption. No one at Apple could help. I contacted Tim Cook’s office and they spent a short period of time confirming the inevitable.
I lost about a year of text messages that I thought were backed up. Everything else I could recover from other systems.
agree entirely : also just want to mention the NeXTstation pizza boxes were just awesome magnesium cases, and, having had one 28 years ago, i sure wish i'd kept mine rather than sell it online....it would be a great case for anything modern.
Only thing I disliked was their keyboard layout, I can't think of a more awkward place for the power button than sandwiched between your brightness and volume controls.
I actually did an mATX retrofit on an old PowerMac G5 tower I picked up on Craigslist for $20. Took some Dremel work, an adapter motherboard tray, a front panel conversion kit, some Noctua NF-A9 fans, uh, an SFX-L power supply and a few sliced fingers - but I'm very happy with how it turned out!
The airflow really can't be beat, it's a gorgeous case, and it's remarkably quiet.
My favorite iterations of early Aqua are those seen in 10.2 through 10.4, too. 10.4 would be on top, but I prefer the matte menubar used in 10.2 and 10.3.
10.5 and 10.6's Aqua aren't bad and certainly better than the newer flat looks, but I was never a big fan of the darker metal look taken on by window chrome in those versions. Aqua in 10.2-10.4 was much more bright and cheery, and as strange as it may sound that reflected in my mood when using my Macs.
Out of the later iterations of Aqua I think the best is that of 10.9. It pulls back on the darkening brought by 10.5/10.6 while refining the rough edges that came with 10.7 and 10.8, and as a whole reminds me a lot of 10.2-10.4 Aqua minus the brushed metal.
10.9 is my daily driver and I'm typing on it right now! I built a Hackintosh with a 4790K and a GTX 780, which more than fast enough for anything I need to do. Interface is great, apps are great, stability is great, and I can browse the web in modern Chromium.
Oh man, the poll below that post makes me weep. Between a Youtube video and a Blog post the Youtube video is winning by a country mile even though a text post would almost certainly be superior for people who want to know the details of how this was done.
I happen to have a spare M1 Mac mini and a G4 at home so this project has my interest. The biggest question for me is how to interface the monitor.
Yes. It must be a generational divide or something. I see so many 20 minute videos that could be a 5 minute read and they have tons of views. I don't get it.
I try to take the approach "why not both?" with my videos... but I understand why many people don't.
Writing a good blog post requires basically a rewrite vs the script, but it's worth it for me since I often prefer a good, concisely-written post.
It takes as much time as at least the script-writing portion of producing a video, but sometimes dozens of hours less if just acquiring some static images and a couple illustrations for the blog post.
But even then, the difficulty comes when people are enticed by popularity and/or monetization.
Since Google basically gave up on RSS, and Medium is an insular (albeit large) private platform, the ability to grow an audience blogging takes more time, requires more concentrated effort, and at best leads to very mild opportunities (overall).
(The number of people like me online blogging for the sake of blogging / sharing knowledge into the void is probably constant, but as a percentage has shrunk down to nothingness.)
Compare that to YouTube, where syndication and subscriptions are much less important and a little knowledge of how the algorithm works can lead to influence and/or monetization... and that's where we are today.
Blogging is not dead, but outside of a few communities it seems to be low on the relevance scale.
Someone could make a mint with a high-quality, Sunflower-style base for the VESA-mount M1 iMac. Make it a docking station with some additional I/O, maybe a color-matched accent of some kind, and you'd have a winner.
I really miss the playfulness and willingness to experiment in some of the old designs. Even the G4 cube was a really interesting idea, even if it had issues.
As much as the asthetic doesn't appeal to me, I love that a lot of gamers mod their PCs with lights and other effects and really pimp them up. I like that people are having fun with the objects that fill their lives. Sometime all the sleek modernism just gets a bit soulless.
The cube is weird to me. I wasn't around when it came out, but I have seen one or two online and in person. I find it intensely ugly but also really beautiful at the same time. It's almost like an ugly baby. It's ugly, but it's alive and it's yours.
It's often called the toaster. I don't know if I love or hate the design, but I do want one. It was, like the trash can Mac Pro, a design with form over function... but was surprisingly easy to service but for the proprietary bits.
This is kind of my point really. All those various "playful" mac designs were loved or hated by people, but they were interesting enough for people to have opinions about. Now the only aesthetic that anyone goes for is a tedious, utilitarian sleekness with a different colours and people argue about the relative merits of hole-punch or notches for their camera.
I'm kind of excited by what I've seen of the Pixel 6. The camera ridge seems to be getting a lot of jokes, but whether you like it or not it looks like someone actually thought about it and made a really conscious decision. Most camera bumps just look like they had to put the camera _somewhere_ so lets stick them in a corner cluster because of some internal engineering decision. The P6 is probably the first phone I've seen where the placement of the cameras looks like a visual design decision not just an engineering one.
It reminds me of when I've worked on stage sets and props. Whatever you do needs to look _intentional_, it has to look like you meant it to be like that, not that you aimed for one thing and ended up with whatever _this_ is, or whatever you had to hand.
In college (so about a decade ago) I bought one of these and put Debian on it. I used it for a year to play Marathon, run XMMS, browse the web, and write OCaml for school. IIRC there was no driver for the Nvidia display chipset so it had to use software rendering but it still (barely) managed to keep up. Fun times!
Later on I decided to install a more spiritually-appropriate OS and threw OpenBSD on it. It sat on my kitchen bar and didn't see much use until I ended up tossing it during a move last year.
Great machine. My grandparents had a Mac catalog at the turn of the millennium that advertised these and boasted about how the processors outperformed P4s with double the clock speed. I didn't believe them back then but now I know better ;-)
> In celebration of Steve Job’s life and his inspiration to many, I wanted to show a passion project I’ve been working on that I think Steve would be proud of. Something that wasn’t possible 20 years ago but is now.
Steve Jobs didn't strike me as the kind of person who'd be proud of a fan doing something like this.
Assuming you mean Wozniak, who left in 1985[1]. Then again, the company is big enough, I cannot exclude the existence of other Steves[2], some of whom might like this kind of tinkering.
Apple's entire being seems to be against allowing the customer any control at all. Maybe it was different years ago but every Apple product I've touched has been a very pretty prison (which isn't necessarily a bad thing)
I seem to recall, though I can't find it: Steve Jobs (while working at NeXt) talking about Apple and the different people vying for control of the company.
He said (and I'm paraphrasing of course) that there are people who really want to push computing forward, and there are people who want to be like Sony and make an integrated commodity. He said that there's a marriage between the two that could be had "but sadly the Sony guys are winning".
I'm not an apologist for Jobs, I don't really care for the man enough to love _or_ hate him the way most seem to, but I believe he was as much a product of the company values as anyone else was.
I'm considered to be very hard nosed and pushing the direction of my company forward and often I clash with people, and granted, I'm not at the top of the company, but the people around me still shape my mentality a lot.
> Blue box designed and built by Steve Wozniak and sold by Steve Jobs before they founded Apple. Displayed at the Powerhouse Museum, from the collection of the Computer History Museum[1]
There was an anniversary edition over ten years ago, but the last time a decade passed by they didn't seem to do anything special. Might have something to do with how much money they make off of non-Mac sales, or maybe Steve was super enthused and everyone else was just humoring him. I suspect the headache of managing a low-volume specialty product is substantial.
I think you're thinking of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, released in spring 1997 a few months before Steve Jobs came back as CEO. He reportedly hated the computer[1] and canceled it soon after he came back[2].
68 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadIf you don't insist on retina for your 20" monitors, it wouldn't be remotely impractical.
This version is really slick.
One thing that I do remember about those machines is that they were massively memory bandwidth limited though, and iirc took PC100 ram at a time when everyone else had PC166 at least...
You can go watch the annual videos where they show photoshop benchmarks running faster on the G3, G4 and G5s. But Intel did take the lead on occasion and kept up mostly. XP also felt faster in UI than early Mac OS X versions, although it did more and improved later on.
In my opinion the '00s produced some absolutely wonderful visual designs across Apple's product range. The fifth generation iPod, first generation iPhone, and pretty much all the iMacs and MacBooks from 2002-2008 are just really nice objects to look at and touch. This is true for the software as well, Tiger remains to this day my favourite interface for any OS ever and I think it's a real shame you can't skin modern macs to look like 2005-era macs!
Tiger was the most pleasing OS I’ve used from a visual perspective. It was also peak skeuomorphic design. I miss Scott Forstall’s influence in every Apple product since he’s been gone.
Really other than Tim whom I don’t care for — Craig Federighi is cog incarnate. Software has only had one good fucking release on iOS since 7 — that being iOS 12. I can’t even imagine how pernicious the internal influence has been on a normative scale adjusted toward “Apple design and UX of Forstall”
I have had an iOS device since iPhone launched. October of 2012 my iPhone backups made locally and in iCloud could not be restored due to corruption. No one at Apple could help. I contacted Tim Cook’s office and they spent a short period of time confirming the inevitable.
I lost about a year of text messages that I thought were backed up. Everything else I could recover from other systems.
The airflow really can't be beat, it's a gorgeous case, and it's remarkably quiet.
There's a subreddit for this, r/G5mods
10.5 and 10.6's Aqua aren't bad and certainly better than the newer flat looks, but I was never a big fan of the darker metal look taken on by window chrome in those versions. Aqua in 10.2-10.4 was much more bright and cheery, and as strange as it may sound that reflected in my mood when using my Macs.
Out of the later iterations of Aqua I think the best is that of 10.9. It pulls back on the darkening brought by 10.5/10.6 while refining the rough edges that came with 10.7 and 10.8, and as a whole reminds me a lot of 10.2-10.4 Aqua minus the brushed metal.
(Make sure to turn on subtitles when watching.)
I happen to have a spare M1 Mac mini and a G4 at home so this project has my interest. The biggest question for me is how to interface the monitor.
Writing a good blog post requires basically a rewrite vs the script, but it's worth it for me since I often prefer a good, concisely-written post.
It takes as much time as at least the script-writing portion of producing a video, but sometimes dozens of hours less if just acquiring some static images and a couple illustrations for the blog post.
But even then, the difficulty comes when people are enticed by popularity and/or monetization.
Since Google basically gave up on RSS, and Medium is an insular (albeit large) private platform, the ability to grow an audience blogging takes more time, requires more concentrated effort, and at best leads to very mild opportunities (overall).
(The number of people like me online blogging for the sake of blogging / sharing knowledge into the void is probably constant, but as a percentage has shrunk down to nothingness.)
Compare that to YouTube, where syndication and subscriptions are much less important and a little knowledge of how the algorithm works can lead to influence and/or monetization... and that's where we are today.
Blogging is not dead, but outside of a few communities it seems to be low on the relevance scale.
As much as the asthetic doesn't appeal to me, I love that a lot of gamers mod their PCs with lights and other effects and really pimp them up. I like that people are having fun with the objects that fill their lives. Sometime all the sleek modernism just gets a bit soulless.
I'm kind of excited by what I've seen of the Pixel 6. The camera ridge seems to be getting a lot of jokes, but whether you like it or not it looks like someone actually thought about it and made a really conscious decision. Most camera bumps just look like they had to put the camera _somewhere_ so lets stick them in a corner cluster because of some internal engineering decision. The P6 is probably the first phone I've seen where the placement of the cameras looks like a visual design decision not just an engineering one.
It reminds me of when I've worked on stage sets and props. Whatever you do needs to look _intentional_, it has to look like you meant it to be like that, not that you aimed for one thing and ended up with whatever _this_ is, or whatever you had to hand.
I still remember this ad for the G4 which feels very similar to Luxo Jr. from Pixar. Really fun.
https://youtu.be/b5P3QDm61go
Later on I decided to install a more spiritually-appropriate OS and threw OpenBSD on it. It sat on my kitchen bar and didn't see much use until I ended up tossing it during a move last year.
Great machine. My grandparents had a Mac catalog at the turn of the millennium that advertised these and boasted about how the processors outperformed P4s with double the clock speed. I didn't believe them back then but now I know better ;-)
Steve Jobs didn't strike me as the kind of person who'd be proud of a fan doing something like this.
*There Woz
Assuming you mean Wozniak, who left in 1985[1]. Then again, the company is big enough, I cannot exclude the existence of other Steves[2], some of whom might like this kind of tinkering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak#Final_departure_...
[2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSteveLimit
Edit: "Based on the last Apple organizational chart that he was aware of, Wozniak said that he still reported to Jobs."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/steve-wozniak-still-on-apple...
He said (and I'm paraphrasing of course) that there are people who really want to push computing forward, and there are people who want to be like Sony and make an integrated commodity. He said that there's a marriage between the two that could be had "but sadly the Sony guys are winning".
I'm not an apologist for Jobs, I don't really care for the man enough to love _or_ hate him the way most seem to, but I believe he was as much a product of the company values as anyone else was.
I'm considered to be very hard nosed and pushing the direction of my company forward and often I clash with people, and granted, I'm not at the top of the company, but the people around me still shape my mentality a lot.
That’s how I took it at least.
If customers were right we would have never had touchscreen phones.
Are you talking about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box:
> Blue box designed and built by Steve Wozniak and sold by Steve Jobs before they founded Apple. Displayed at the Powerhouse Museum, from the collection of the Computer History Museum[1]
Also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-d...
If so, you might have your Apple Computer Steves mixed up.
/Former phreaker and cypherpunk
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2009-03-20-remembering-the-tam.html
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3066213/the-one-jony-ive-compute...