The Power Mac G4: A Look Back at a Professional Development Platform

As we take a closer look at this old Power Mac G4, it's hard not to feel a sense of nostalgia. With its original 64MB of RAM and power supply on the side, this machine was a beast in its time. The two optical drives were nestled in their respective cages, with one combo drive and three and a half inch hard disks taking up most of the space inside. It's clear that this was a Pro machine, designed for professionals who needed raw power to get the job done.

The Power Mac G4 was a significant upgrade from its predecessors, offering a faster processor and more memory. The addition of four RAM sticks, each with 256MB of capacity, brought the total RAM to a whopping 1GB. This amount of memory was considered state-of-the-art at the time, making it an ideal machine for professionals who needed to multitask and run multiple applications simultaneously.

As we examine the motherboard, it's clear that this machine is a real treasure trove of old-school tech. The Nanya RAM chips are a mystery, but our expert estimates suggest they're each 256MB in capacity. The battery looks like it's still intact, with no signs of leakage or wear. And with its massive 164GB hard drive, this machine was capable of storing an incredible amount of data.

But what really sets the Power Mac G4 apart is its age. Built sometime around the late 1990s, this machine was a relic of a bygone era before the rise of Intel-based processors. It's a reminder that even in the digital age, technology can be both nostalgic and fascinating. The fact that this machine has been passed down through generations, from my boss to my brother, speaks volumes about its enduring appeal.

As I ponder the history of this Power Mac G4, it's hard not to think about the era in which it was built. The late 1990s were a time of great change and innovation, with the rise of the internet and the emergence of new technologies like Java and XML. It was an exciting time for professionals who needed powerful machines to stay ahead of the curve.

For me, personally, this machine holds a special place in my heart. I remember using it extensively as a professional development platform, running Max and other applications that took full advantage of its capabilities. And despite being replaced by newer models like the G5 and Intel-based Mac Pros, this Power Mac G4 remains one of my favorite machines to date.

In fact, I recall spending hours working on this machine, setting up projects and exporting files for clients. It was a quiet, peaceful experience, with the only sound coming from the gentle whir of the hard drive and the soft glow of the CRT monitor. It's a memory that's both fond and nostalgic, evoking a sense of comfort and familiarity.

As I continue to clean this machine and prepare it for use, I'm filled with excitement about what we might be able to achieve with an old Power Mac G4. Will we be able to run modern applications like Adobe Creative Cloud or Autodesk? Only time will tell, but one thing's for sure – this machine is a relic of the past worth preserving for its historical significance and nostalgic value.

So, if you're interested in seeing us fire up this old Power Mac G4 and see what it can do, be sure to subscribe to our channel and join us on this journey into the world of retro computing. We'll take it from here, exploring the capabilities of this ancient machine and bringing it back online for a new generation of users. Who knows? You might just be surprised at how well it still holds up today.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni have with me today one of the last g4 power max that apple made this is the mirror drive door version so called because it's cd drive door is mirrored i think it's a lovely machine and this one is quite special because this was my power mac g4 and this machine saw me through a time of change in my professional career and really helped me progress as a developer and i was also working on this machine when i first sort of made the decisions to start out in business for myself but then after i'd finished with it my youngest brother bought it off me and he then used it to develop his career and he's a far better developer than i ever was and he's also a director in our web studio at the moment so not only did this help me through a career change it also helped my brother launch his career as well so quite a special computer and i've not seen it for a long time my brother did bring it into the web studio and for a long time it's been used as an ornament here and then then it got moved and put in a cupboard and it's all dusty and well i thought we'd take a look at it i really like this design over the g4 power mac that came before it and also the multi-colored g3 power max this is just somehow more classy and i still think it looks good today the mirror drive doors these sort of open up there's a cd rewriter i think in there you could have two of them of course you've also got your power button here on the front and a headphone socket now i'm not going to switch this on today because i know it's got a battery inside which i'll need to check that it hasn't leaked we need to check the capacitors over before we put any power in this thing hasn't been switched on for five or six years probably so it will be touch and goes to whether or not it actually fires up there's another slight issue as well and that is on the back on the graphics card you've got an adc connection do you remember those and uh dvi so i'll need to dig out some adapters to try and get it connected to one of our more modern screens just take a look at the the back and the ports that were on this so it came with two usb 1.1 ports it looks like at some point i've put an adding card in which is probably two usb 2 ports type a we've got two firewire 400s as well as a firewire 800 there's also a one gigabit ethernet port here and a built-in modem we've also got the audio ports it looks like there's been a little bit of damage to one of them there got a power supply up here looks like at some point we've put a wireless network card in as well but not a standard apple airport card there's also a sticker here that says assembled in ireland i don't know if apple was still making any machines in ireland but that's uh that's quite nice to see and i can see the specs listed here so this is a one gigahertz g4 processor it would have come with 256 megabytes of ddr ram a 60 gigabyte drive by the look of it as well let's open it up and have a look always love the opening mechanism on this you just pull up the lever look at that whole case just slides open uh i don't know how well you can see that i'll do a close-up again bit of a dusty mess i have to say so we can see our add-in cards here this at the top is where the apple airport card would have gone and i can see the antenna wire here so we do have a fan here on the side and there is a big fan here which when the case is back together that's blowing straight through the cpu heatsink and the cpu itself is mounted onto a daughter board on these machines and that daughter board also contains all of the ports that we just described on the the back of the machine we've got uh by the look of it four pci slots i don't know what specification they would be quite old obviously and the graphics card is plugged into an agp x4 port i'm trying to work out what model the graphics card would be because these came as standard with nvidia cards i suspect this was upgraded to an ati radeon and i suspect a 9700 pro with 64 megs of ram we'll have to check that when if and when we can switch it on over here we've got a power supply on the side you've got your cage here for your two optical drives this one's just got one combo drive in it and then we've got two hard disks here three and a half inch hard disks which are ide obviously for the age of the machine the one at the front here is a hitachi desk star which has obviously been added afterwards and it says on it 164 gigabytes i suspect that would have been quite a lot at the time we've also got four sticks of ram in here and they don't all match so i'm going to guess let's take see if we can take one out i've got no idea what that is i don't suspect that's original i've never seen ram chips with nanya written on them does anybody recognize that name i suspect they're probably um 256 megs each i suspect we've got one gigabyte of ram in this machine that sort of sounds familiar but we'll i'll have to check that here is the battery that i was talking about doesn't look to have leaked at all and i have to say there are a lot of capacitors on this board and i don't see any obvious evidence of leakage at all we might be okay to switch it on but i'm going to do a clean on this before i do that and just sort of gauge your interest as well to see whether you'd like to see that there is actually space here at the front for two more hard disks and all of the cabling is here ready so you could have equipped this machine with four three and a half inch hard disks it's this was a pro machine in the day i remember it being a good performer i had a pc as well at the time and i i don't remember at all what the specification of the pc was but i know that i didn't use it much after i got the apple mac whether or not that's because i just preferred using this machine or whether the pc was slower i don't remember but this is an interesting thing isn't it in the whole mac versus pc debate is that you know that pc which i would have built myself i i don't remember it i don't remember the spec don't remember anything about it but i've got quite a soft spot for this particular mac it wasn't the first mac that i bought and i didn't buy it new either i bought this off my boss at the company i was working for at the time and i was looking for a mac and i couldn't quite stretch to a new one and he had this one available used so i bought it i bought a massive crt monitor to go with it which i only kept for a few months because apple then bought out the original cinema display so i've got a 20 inch cinema display which i paired up with this computer and yeah it was a really nice setup and i miss it i miss using it it was very quiet in operation as well i remember that about it and of course these machines didn't last that much longer before they were replaced by the g5 the g5 power mac though that didn't last very long maybe two or three years before the the actual intel mac pro came out which was in the same cheese grater style case i had this computer up until about the time of the transition from power pc over to intel because i had this and i remember i also had a g4 ibook a white one at the time and i then sold this one to my brother i sold the ibook and i bought a macbook pro 17-inch when the first intel versions of those came out which was quite a beast it was a lot of money and i remember i took out a loan to buy it and it took a long time to pay off but great machine again that i did a lot of work on that machine so although i had max before this particular machine this is the one that really switched me on to mac as a professional development uh platform and i moved away from pc onto mac only for quite a period of time actually so i hope you enjoyed this quick look at the the power mac g4 if you're interested in seeing me clean this up and get it going again assuming my brother's um okay with me doing that because it does belong to him after all then i'll make a video about that and we'll we'll fire it up and see what we can do with an old power mac g4 anyway i hope you enjoyed the video if you did like the content then please consider supporting the channel with just one click of that subscribe button hopefully i did enough to run a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your thing in any case see you next time for some more geekery youi have with me today one of the last g4 power max that apple made this is the mirror drive door version so called because it's cd drive door is mirrored i think it's a lovely machine and this one is quite special because this was my power mac g4 and this machine saw me through a time of change in my professional career and really helped me progress as a developer and i was also working on this machine when i first sort of made the decisions to start out in business for myself but then after i'd finished with it my youngest brother bought it off me and he then used it to develop his career and he's a far better developer than i ever was and he's also a director in our web studio at the moment so not only did this help me through a career change it also helped my brother launch his career as well so quite a special computer and i've not seen it for a long time my brother did bring it into the web studio and for a long time it's been used as an ornament here and then then it got moved and put in a cupboard and it's all dusty and well i thought we'd take a look at it i really like this design over the g4 power mac that came before it and also the multi-colored g3 power max this is just somehow more classy and i still think it looks good today the mirror drive doors these sort of open up there's a cd rewriter i think in there you could have two of them of course you've also got your power button here on the front and a headphone socket now i'm not going to switch this on today because i know it's got a battery inside which i'll need to check that it hasn't leaked we need to check the capacitors over before we put any power in this thing hasn't been switched on for five or six years probably so it will be touch and goes to whether or not it actually fires up there's another slight issue as well and that is on the back on the graphics card you've got an adc connection do you remember those and uh dvi so i'll need to dig out some adapters to try and get it connected to one of our more modern screens just take a look at the the back and the ports that were on this so it came with two usb 1.1 ports it looks like at some point i've put an adding card in which is probably two usb 2 ports type a we've got two firewire 400s as well as a firewire 800 there's also a one gigabit ethernet port here and a built-in modem we've also got the audio ports it looks like there's been a little bit of damage to one of them there got a power supply up here looks like at some point we've put a wireless network card in as well but not a standard apple airport card there's also a sticker here that says assembled in ireland i don't know if apple was still making any machines in ireland but that's uh that's quite nice to see and i can see the specs listed here so this is a one gigahertz g4 processor it would have come with 256 megabytes of ddr ram a 60 gigabyte drive by the look of it as well let's open it up and have a look always love the opening mechanism on this you just pull up the lever look at that whole case just slides open uh i don't know how well you can see that i'll do a close-up again bit of a dusty mess i have to say so we can see our add-in cards here this at the top is where the apple airport card would have gone and i can see the antenna wire here so we do have a fan here on the side and there is a big fan here which when the case is back together that's blowing straight through the cpu heatsink and the cpu itself is mounted onto a daughter board on these machines and that daughter board also contains all of the ports that we just described on the the back of the machine we've got uh by the look of it four pci slots i don't know what specification they would be quite old obviously and the graphics card is plugged into an agp x4 port i'm trying to work out what model the graphics card would be because these came as standard with nvidia cards i suspect this was upgraded to an ati radeon and i suspect a 9700 pro with 64 megs of ram we'll have to check that when if and when we can switch it on over here we've got a power supply on the side you've got your cage here for your two optical drives this one's just got one combo drive in it and then we've got two hard disks here three and a half inch hard disks which are ide obviously for the age of the machine the one at the front here is a hitachi desk star which has obviously been added afterwards and it says on it 164 gigabytes i suspect that would have been quite a lot at the time we've also got four sticks of ram in here and they don't all match so i'm going to guess let's take see if we can take one out i've got no idea what that is i don't suspect that's original i've never seen ram chips with nanya written on them does anybody recognize that name i suspect they're probably um 256 megs each i suspect we've got one gigabyte of ram in this machine that sort of sounds familiar but we'll i'll have to check that here is the battery that i was talking about doesn't look to have leaked at all and i have to say there are a lot of capacitors on this board and i don't see any obvious evidence of leakage at all we might be okay to switch it on but i'm going to do a clean on this before i do that and just sort of gauge your interest as well to see whether you'd like to see that there is actually space here at the front for two more hard disks and all of the cabling is here ready so you could have equipped this machine with four three and a half inch hard disks it's this was a pro machine in the day i remember it being a good performer i had a pc as well at the time and i i don't remember at all what the specification of the pc was but i know that i didn't use it much after i got the apple mac whether or not that's because i just preferred using this machine or whether the pc was slower i don't remember but this is an interesting thing isn't it in the whole mac versus pc debate is that you know that pc which i would have built myself i i don't remember it i don't remember the spec don't remember anything about it but i've got quite a soft spot for this particular mac it wasn't the first mac that i bought and i didn't buy it new either i bought this off my boss at the company i was working for at the time and i was looking for a mac and i couldn't quite stretch to a new one and he had this one available used so i bought it i bought a massive crt monitor to go with it which i only kept for a few months because apple then bought out the original cinema display so i've got a 20 inch cinema display which i paired up with this computer and yeah it was a really nice setup and i miss it i miss using it it was very quiet in operation as well i remember that about it and of course these machines didn't last that much longer before they were replaced by the g5 the g5 power mac though that didn't last very long maybe two or three years before the the actual intel mac pro came out which was in the same cheese grater style case i had this computer up until about the time of the transition from power pc over to intel because i had this and i remember i also had a g4 ibook a white one at the time and i then sold this one to my brother i sold the ibook and i bought a macbook pro 17-inch when the first intel versions of those came out which was quite a beast it was a lot of money and i remember i took out a loan to buy it and it took a long time to pay off but great machine again that i did a lot of work on that machine so although i had max before this particular machine this is the one that really switched me on to mac as a professional development uh platform and i moved away from pc onto mac only for quite a period of time actually so i hope you enjoyed this quick look at the the power mac g4 if you're interested in seeing me clean this up and get it going again assuming my brother's um okay with me doing that because it does belong to him after all then i'll make a video about that and we'll we'll fire it up and see what we can do with an old power mac g4 anyway i hope you enjoyed the video if you did like the content then please consider supporting the channel with just one click of that subscribe button hopefully i did enough to run a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your thing in any case see you next time for some more geekery you\n"