Ask HN: Any Use for a Power Mac G4? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any Use for a Power Mac G4?

13 pointsgandalfff20 comments

I have an old Power Mac G4 MDD on my hands and I was wondering if anyone could think of some cool uses for it!

Sell it, man. There's a huge market for vintage PCs like this - people love to run old games/software on the original machines they were designed for.

A quick look online suggests people value it around 2-3x as much as an i5 machine with 8GB RAM.

Whoa! Where are you seeing it sold for that price?

eBay Australia. The Powermac goes for around $200 whereas a far more useful, but less sexy used office PC will set you back under $100.

A PowerMac G4 will run the latest OpenBSD. https://www.openbsd.org/macppc.html I run it on one of my iMac G4's (and on many other non-PPC machines). It occurs to me that if you replace the HDD with an SSD it would also be quite a lot faster.

If you don't want to use it, toss it on Craigslist for sure (if you have a local Craigslist site). Depending on the specs and your location I'd expect around $50-75 CAD (basing this on Vancouver Canada area and habitually searching the words "macintosh", "powermac", "powerpc" etc. literally every day :) )

Of course, check out MorphOS.

Also relevant : https://lowendmac.com/

Check can it run MorphOS ?

https://www.morphos-team.net/hardware

https://www.morphos-team.net

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorphOS

Looks like it can! Very interesting

I bought a g4 laptop for vintage computing, but once the initial excitement retired I kept it on bookshelf. I don't regret buying it because it only cost 50 bucks including postal charge and even the battery still works.

So yeah I agree with a fellow commentor that if you don't know what to do maybe find someone who can pay premium and sell it.

Might want to keep the battery charged every so often or it will die completely. My iBook G4 batteries from ~2004 still hold plenty of charge, surprisingly enough! I've had far newer laptop batteries die completely because I forgot to recharge them... :(

Thanks! Haven't charged for a while...

OpenBSD 7.1 still offers the macppc port. It was pretty fast on my later G4s.

Nice, I used to use one of those at work! That was a weapon of mass creation back in the day. I don't know what counts as cool to you, but to me just using the thing as-outfitted seems pretty cool :D

Put Adelie Linux on it, and you'll still be able to browse when the cyberattacks take down all the x86 machines.

I did try a Linux live image and unfortunately the experience was not very usable

Void Linux might work better with low resources https://voidlinux-ppc.org

Running code destined for space, or the Xbox 1 or …

Xbox 1 was x86. The 360 was PPC, but more recent than the G4. As a matter of fact, the first 360 dev kits were PowerMac G5.

Does Linux support it? I recently installed Arch on my old MacBook ‘Early 2009’ (but that’s an Intel machine).

A kindred spirit. I have Arch running on a 2008 iMac. It is almost embarrassing how much I use it. It is my main video conferencing spot as I like the big 4:3 screen. I was playing Diablo ( DevilitionX ) on it earlier today.

Remove the head sink and reuse it for other projects, beyond that i had no use for mine.

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