I still have one too. It was pretty to look at but probably the worst new Mac I've ever owned. Within a year it was obnoxiously loud and pretty much obsoleted after just a couple years.
In contrast, I bought a new "Late `09 Mac Mini that I just replaced with a used late 2014 Mac mini about 2 months ago. That `09 was a real workhorse for a lot of years.
The `14 only cost me $330 at OWC with 16GB RAM and is running the latest versions of the software I use and the only software I needed to pay for an update was BBEdit, and that only cost me around $35. I think I paid around $1200 for that G4 "Silver Door" tower.
Thos machines sucked -- Look at SGI their cases were stellar in design even if the guts were mediocre RISC and difficult OS... and they were like 25K for a desktop and 500K for a rack-sized server.
When we built the Presidio complex for Lucas (I was the data center designer) they were throwing out $500,000 SGI racks and even turned a few of them into keg-erators... SGI had the BEST physical case designs.... ( I suppose thats why the tech museum is on the SGI campus)
Let's be realistic, the actual "FU" didn't come until they announced the G4 cube and redesigned iMac.
Btw, I’m surprised you like the Z8 series. The single core and sum compute with total of cores looks like a terrible value (eg when looking at various benchmarks for the Xeon) — ie thousands of dollars for a machine with a chip that appears far less powerful than the latest i7s or Ryzens.
Curious what I’m missing.
The look on people's faces when they came in and realized none of our stuff ran on Microsoft gave our shops street cred in the cyclists and mountain biking communities.
Patents, cost, who knows. But I would have bought it.
Today, with a 3d printer, the mod could be done very elegantly.
I never particularly liked the aesthetics of the tower case but the practicality of the design is nothing short of breathtaking.
What about the new Mac Pro?