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iMac G4(K)

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424 pointsingve169 comments

I was working at Apple when that particular model Mac was being developed. Those of us with no need-to-know got odd prototypes that looked more like a steel ammo box with bundle of cables coming out the back — tethered to a display that you had to prop up (some people might have got a kind of simple stand for the display).

In any event, the elaborate arm mechanism, dome plastics we would not know until the model was unveiled to the world at whatever the event was.

Before that though, the steel box didn't stop us from opening it up to look inside. Though our steel enclosures had something closer to a baseball "home plate" footprint, when we peeked inside we saw the circular PCB and knew we were being duped.

With the dangly display they seemed to go quicker than other prototypes to the dumpsters left in Apple's hallways when the actual product was released. I am aware of three MAME machines I built around discarded prototypes. (Shhh!!!!)

I think two of the three prototypes running MAME died eventually — the third I left behind at Apple when I retired. So, fate unknown.

Shortly after though is probably when Apple started locking the dumpsters to keep out the divers like me. (Well, probably more to keep them from ending up on eBay I suspect.)

The design is practically begging for someone to try swapping out the computer side. It's almost like a tower-and-screen setup.

People have done it. The most recent Mac mini’s are so small that their guts can be crammed in the bottom if you replace the original board and power supply. Then put a brand new screen up at the top and run the wires through the arm and you get something really cool.

Isn't that basically what the article is?

It’s close. Unless I misunderstood something I thought the Mac mini was being kept out of the case and was actually somewhere else and then plugged into it with HDMI or something. I thought the old iMac was basically acting as a fancy monitor stand with built in display (later upgraded).

No, he's got it in there (2nd and 3rd images from the bottom). The power button peeps out through the RAM door.

Not really, the dock board doesn't require a screen replacement.

Edit: oops needed to read further on. You're right.

Ps:

> I'm not sure whether the DockLite or the 20-year old LCD screen is to blame for this, but there is noticeable color banding on the screen, especially with macOS window shadows.

Yeah that would be the LCD. In those days most LCDs were pretty crappy 6-bit TN panels.

yeah that’s how i understood the article.

or at least pretend to believe i understand it.

as with most newly introduced concepts

It’s so cute!!!

I wish Apple would release a retro line like this and with it the M4 chips.

For all intents and porpoises, it should be the video HomePod variant.

edit: … with a “Follow Me” FaceTime camera

But this camera turns the screen to follow you.

The spiritual successor to the Pixar Luxo Jr.

After all the DEI shenanigans, Apple should bring the rainbow apple logo back.

They’d probably lose all federal contracts for four years, but they’d gain some even more dedicated following.

While I bitterly objected to Steve Jobs cancelling the Newton (apparently one of the reasons was the USMC having great success testing them for battlefield use and being on the verge of a general deployment/contract and SJ not wanting to be a Defense Contractor), I'll have to buy something (my first Apple purchase for myself since buying OpenSTEP 4.2) if Apple continues to be the only principled multi-national.

Their products are really good. Others might have better numbers, the same way a McLaren can be faster than a 911, but the 911 is a much more pleasant drive.

Yeah, the problem is my preference is for machines with styluses/handwriting/drawing capabilities (hence my fondness for the Newton).

Sadly, the iPad and its walled garden don't appeal to me --- the "click" of the Apple Pencil when it is touched to the screen drives me nuts --- really sad that there isn't a real successor to the Axiotron Modbook. I'm tempted by a Mac Mini w/ a Wacom Movink 13 screen, but it's quite low resolution compared to the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 I'm writing this out on.

It's nearly Apple's 50th anniversary. I've thought for a while now that a limited run of the rainbow logo on their products would be a great (and lucrative) celebration gimmick.

Make the Apple logo on the back of the laptop be a full color display that lights up with the rainbow when you run the full screen Apple ][ simulator.

Love that idea. I would totally buy a M4 Cube.

It's wild that there was a feeling when that computer came out of "this is the coolest computer design ever," and then the world moved past that.

You can look at the iMac line and see that they moved to a more laptopy everything-in-the-screen design, which got rid of the base altogether. But it's weird and sad that there was a "best" and then things that came after the best that were less fun, and two decades later we all still seem to feel that way.

I suppose part of that was all the attention that shifted to touchscreen phones, and computers becoming thought of as practical work tools.

Looking at imac G3->G4->G5 each one was a huge step in design. I think the G4 stands out to me because the "floating" display was something I had never seen before.

The G3 an G4 towers deserve extra special design mention. From a tinkering and engineering point of view, they were _lovely_ to work on.

Only the Bondi Blue G3 towers, the previous beige G3 towers were much worse to work on.

Those were left-over 9600 cases and Steve would probably have told you that Gil was a fucking moron.

What's wild to me is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are basically computer illiterate by and large.

The reason old computers were fun is because all the hip young millennials loved them for everything. That has become much less the case as the younger generations do everything with a phone/tablet/or console. Just surfing the internet for my generation was a chore that is hard for the younger generations to understand.

> What's wild to me is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are basically computer illiterate by and large.

That's something I've realized as well. There was a time where typing was something more and more people could do, but now nobody cares/needs to learn how. The number of households that had at least one computer was something I thought would get to pretty much everyone, but now there are more and more people with the only compute device being their phone. Owning a computer seems to be an age indicator like wearing tube socks.

I have a teenager and a elementary schooler and both enjoy PC gaming.

The elder is interested in game development through his love of Roblox. I hope to help him get started with an IDE for lua, git, and a LLM and turn him loose on it.

> and a LLM

this makes me nervous for proper learning of anything in the future. when the first step to learning is an LLM vs learning the basics with a good understanding and then moving to the "advanced" tools, I don't think this is really learning

The llm can teach you the basics. It's really good at it.

You can't see if it's really learning or not until you see how it's used.

so now you're implying that everyone that has ever learned anything before an LLM could not see if they were really learning or not? the overly zealous pro-LLM crowd makes me sad that they cannot admit how ridiculous they sound to rationally thinking people

To me it seemed like the comment said the complete opposite of what you are implying? i.e. "llm can teach you the basics" BUT "You can't see if it's really learning or not until you see how it's used."

No, not at all.

I'm saying you can't judge some learning process that you're not even witnessing.

Maybe you haven't used an LLM to learn something; maybe you just let it write your code. Not everyone does that.

When folks like you narrow arguments "everyone can only use the LLM exactly like I have, and if you do that, it really hinders your learning"---who sounds irrational?

the joke's on you then as I've never used an LLM. i see the results of other people using them, and i'm not impressed.

so who's irrational now by assuming something completely off base?

You're vigorously defending your opinion on LLMs after never having used one?

I think you've made my point

just because I don't use it doesn't mean I'm ignorant on the subject.

I see a lot of morphine addicts, so I'm not ignorant about morphine.

Morphine is awful and should be banned--just look at these behaviors from addicts.

If you talk to me about valid uses like "minimizing suffering for terminal patients," I'm going to put my fingers in my ears, because I've seen the addicts.

It can teach him game development better than I can. I have zero experience with it but I can teach him about the software development lifecycle, version control, and whatnot.

If it sparks his interest he has a lot of life ahead of him to go deeper with it.

> this makes me nervous for proper learning of anything in the future

I don't really understand this fear, particularly now with the reasoning models that explain why they did something.

Nobody is going to read and the "thoughts" they do output are hardly every particularly coherent or insightful (Deepseak is just sem-unhinged continuous rambling and Open AI of course hides most of the reasoning).

Even if the steps/explanations were actually useful and insightful, though IMHO that's not remotely the same thing as figuring out the steps on your own.

When chatGPT corrects my writing, the explanations are actually quite helpful.

> IMHO that's not remotely the same thing as figuring out the steps on your own.

This is true with pretty much anything, but it doesn't mean we should ignore tools that can do those steps for you.

Presumably you knew how to write before ChatGPT was a thing, though?

> we should ignore

Never implied anything of the sort. But it can be a bit like kids not learning basic math and skipping straight to using calculators for everything just 10x worse.

Well I just used a LLM to write a systemd unit for me. One attempt kinda works but it doesn't do what I wanted, the other would do what I wanted if it worked at all.

Every line is explained in detail. They just don't help :)

You're on HN leaving this comment. I don't think the children of HN commenters are representative. :)

You might be off by a generation.

I was born in 86. My dad got the first Mac as he was graduating from college. I think I was 13 when the iMac G3 and the X Public Beta came out.

Computers were well entrenched in my childhood, but it was the people who were adults when we were children that designed the fun ones.

You're a millennial :)

I agree that adults designed our fun computers but those were adults that specialized in making those devices. If you looked at the average Gen Xer of the era you'd find they have very little interaction with computers.

It was our generation who had computers in the home as children. Very few of prior generations had that privilege.

Gen Z also had PCs in the home as children.

Had PCs, yes. Used PCs? IDK.

Gen Z starts around 95. The ipod touch came out in 07. That means that the hot device to get came out when the oldest Gen Z turned 12.

I'd grant that older genz were probably more exposed, but that exposure and familiarity pretty rapidly decreases as they age.

So I was born in '96. We actually used our elementary school PCs less than younger years because not as much work had been digitized yet, plus it wasn't a given that every student had internet at home. iPhones became hot 2009-2012 when I was in middle school (gen1 iPhone/iPt was too early), but everyone needed a PC at home for schoolwork, same in high school. We were fortunate enough to have a computer science class, which literally 10X'd in popularity the year after I took it. Later years also used laptops more for non-CS stuff.

PC games were mainstream too, so it wasn't just work. Really hit me when the school jocks started joining my Minecraft server. Again I think consoles were actually more popular in earlier times, cause PCs couldn't run as many good games until the 2010s.

I can't speak as much for the younger side of gen Z. I assume CS is still more popular among them, there are more PC video gamers than before, and there are Chromebooks if you count that. Not sure if iPads ever actually replaced PCs, besides it was always in Apple's interest not to cannibalize the Mac line.

I don't really count chromebooks because it's an OS that does a LOT to hide the details of how computers work from the end user. That's sort of where I see the computer illiteracy coming from. Android and iOS both do a lot to try and hide away what computers are behind nice app icons.

Even the rise of needing computers/internet access to do homework has sort of worked against learning how computers work. It's all bubble wrapped to hide away the nitty gritty details.

And I'm not actually even saying this is a bad thing. It's just that the way you work with a computer is very different than it was for me. By the time you were exposed a lot of things had already been very simplified.

Just to give you an idea of what I mean by that.

For me to install a game on my old DOS computer, I had to work with potentially multiple 3.5 floppy disks. I'd run `cd A:\` to get to the A drive where the floppy resided. From there I'd run `dir \w` to get a list of the files on the floppy disk. I'd be on the lookout for a `SETUP.EXE` or `INSTALL.EXE` file to start the install process. From there, the installation prompt would ask me a bunch of questions about my computer things like "What sort of sound card do you have"? "What is the IRQ port for your card"? "Do you have a VooDoo Graphics card"? "Where do you want to install this game (We recommend C:\DOOM)"?

After some whirring and clicking the install would be complete and we'd have to `cd C:\DOOM` and run `DOOM.EXE`. There we'd run the executable and... shoot, I put in the wrong sound sound card, the wrong port, etc. It's at that point we'd have to diagnose the problem, maybe modify an .ini file. All from reading the manuals and past experience.

It's that sort of experience that I have which made me intimately familiar with concepts like file systems and disk partitions. Familiar with random parts of a computer in ways that were vastly simplified. I mean, for example, I had to do things like installing new GPU drivers to make some games work properly. I couldn't just trust windows update to grab a relatively up to date (or even the correct) driver.

That said, I'm 1000% sure your CS class was WAY better than my intro to programming. The resources I had for programming were really bad. It was a lot of self taught effort.

With this Mac in front of me, am I really digging into technical details more than on a Chromebook or iPhone? Taking away the iTerm2 window on the other screen (since not everyone is a programmer), all I've got is a web browser, calendar, and mail. In the OS X Tiger and WinXP days, probably the same plus iChat/AIM and MS Word. The trickiest thing was maybe saving a Word doc to a USB stick, which is still easier than using Google Drive.

Old stuff that required command lines was harder, but I think that was niche and very few people understood it.

> Old stuff that required command lines was harder, but I think that was niche and very few people understood it.

And this is why I'm telling you that millennials were more computer literate :D.

We grew up when this old stuff that required command lines was the norm. Maybe you had to be there.

The user experience drastically improved in pretty much every way as I got older. My first computer was DOS which is just a command line. Imagine doing everything through iTerm2 and that's how I and a fair number of millennials (particularly older millennials) interacted with computers.

Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 weren't much more than wrappers over dos. For a lot of programs you'd install (Doom for example, but also games like Warcraft and Warcraft II) you still had to do a lot of the work I described above to get them functional.

From a windows perspective it really wasn't until windows XP or so that things became as smooth as you experienced. Everything before that was DEEPLY exposing nearly every aspect of how a computer worked to the end user.

Mac was a bit different, it was always somewhat easier to use than Windows was. However, I and most of my friends dealt primarily with windows machines because that's where the games were all at (and they were cheaper for the hardware you got).

My generation was the one where computers became cheap enough that everyone had one, yet still ran software written primarily for more technical computer people. OS and software devs spent literally decades polishing the UX by the time the first Gen Zers rolled around.

So the average millennial actually used a PC regularly for these things? When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990, which is about what I expected. But then there's school and libraries.

Yes.

> When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990

Millennials go from 80 to 95. The oldest millennials were 9 at 1990. Just 5 years later, 1995, household computers rose to 39% in the US.

For most millennials that boom in computers happened right at their formative years. The millennials were also driving a lot of it. Parents got computers for their kids.

> I don't really count chromebooks because it's an OS that does a LOT to hide the details of how computers work from the end user. That's sort of where I see the computer illiteracy coming from. Android and iOS both do a lot to try and hide away what computers are behind nice app icons

Crostini allows for full-blown Linux VMs. I would have killed for a click-to-reinstall Linux sandbox in my childhood.

Crostini allows for full-blown Linux VMs on ChromeOS. I would have killed for a click-to-reinstall Linux sandbox in my childhood.

There is a big split in computer literacy whether they gamed on xbox or gamed on pc during those years.

Gen-X was the first generation to grow up with home computers not Millennials.

Everybody I knew growing up had an 8 bit computer of some sort.

Spectrums, ZX-81s, Beebs, C64s, VIC-20s and Amstrads were everywhere.

They were followed in the mid to late 80s by PCs, Archimedes, Amigas and STs.

Gen-X typed in BASIC and assembly language programs from magazines in the local newsagent. We peeked and poked to hack our games.

We argued at school about which computer platform was best and it meant more than just PC vs Mac.

That experience was mostly gone by the time the oldest millennials were teenagers.

I'm not sure they were as widespread as you think. I was born in the late 70s, and while we did get a ti-99/4a when they hit the bargain bin, I didn't have another computer at home until I started college in the 90s. Until then I had to use the computer lab at school because they were simply too expensive for us to own one at home.

And the TI I had was of limited use when I had to use it on the family TV and any basic I typed couldn't be saved because we didn't have the floppy drive.

Might depend on location but in the UK and most of Europe at least, 8 bit computers were very, very common.

The ZX Spectrum went for about £99, that was pretty cheap even back then. The less capable ZX81 was only £49 in kit form.

Games consoles were not common here until the 90s because of the wide take up of home computers.

> Gen-X was the first generation to grow up with home computers not Millennials. > Everybody I knew growing up had an 8 bit computer of some sort.

My anecdotal experience is that while Gen X were the first generation who could have grown up with a home computer, it still wasn't that common until a fair bit later.

I'm smack bang in the middle of the Millennial generation, and we first got a home computer when I was 11, and at that time I'd say it was 50/50 whether someone's family had a home computer.

I was born in 84. My dad was an early adopter of PCs and online communication (BBSes, CompuServe, and later the Internet), and we always had a computer in the house. I also got to tinker with his old machines when he upgraded, which taught me a lot.

However, having a home computer was still somewhat of a luxury, and definitely not a necessity until at least high school for me. It wasn't until college that I could ask someone what their email address was without first asking whether they had email at all.

I don't know if you're thinking about all the millennials or just a few. PCs weren't as common in the early 90s.

I know there's computer illiterate millennials. If you could turn it into a literacy ranking or percentage my argument is that more millennials (by a large margin) are computer literate than any other generation.

I think that's gen Z. For the younger half, you might have to decide whether or not a Chromebook qualifies as a PC, but idk if it even matters because Mac/Windows PCs are still necessary for work or used for games.

I could be mistaken but I think parent is referring to computer literacy as the interest in tinkering with and/or programming computers, not just using them to write school papers.

I too am quite fearful of the fact that I know zero kids under the age of 15 who have any interest in learning how computers work, despite being completely surrounded by them since age 8 or 9 (via school-issued Chromebooks).

I'm 28, and when I was 15, I didn't know anyone tinkering with computers either. Besides myself, and the other kids at school didn't take kindly to that.

Now I do know a lot of kids under 15 doing computer tinkering, usually gaming PCs. If anything, I'm worried that they do it too much.

Sure, computers grew in popularity throughout the 90s but I wouldn't call them uncommon in the early 90s - they were all over the place especially in schools.

My kindergarten classroom had an Apple II in 1989. Our first grade classroom had old IBM PCs.

My parents bought our first computer in '94 and we were one of the later families to have one (these were actual middle class families).

PC as such no much.

Spectrums, Commodore, Atari, Amiga, PC, Acorn, as home computers ecosystem surely.

At least in Europe we weren't that much into consoles, having a home system was one from the list above.

They weren't?

My view is certainly skewed since we had a 386SX, but there were tens of thousands of BBS's running back then. Online services exploded in the early 90's, shareware games like Doom and Wolfenstein sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1992, Gateway 2000 surpassed Dell by selling over a billion dollars in PC's.

> What's wild to me is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are basically computer illiterate by and large.

That really depends on how you define computer literate, because I'm seeing some incredible work being done by the younger generations, both for modern computers, but also for the machines of my youth in the 80s and 90s. Most of the Gen Z I previously taught might not know Excel, Word or even Windows, but they certainly knows how to use and abuse Google Docs and Sheets.

As for deep knowledge on the inner workings of a PC, I don't think they are worse of then previous generations. You have a tiny group of absolute geniuses, a small, but larger group of above average who will become future engineers and developers, then an tiny group of people who can operate modern Windows applications will insane skill levels, and finally the reset, who can sort of get by.

> I'm seeing some incredible work being done by the younger generations, both for modern computers, but also for the machines of my youth in the 80s and 90s.

I don't dispute that. The younger generations have a huge leg up in terms of available educational resources.

My point is more that the average millennial will be computer literate while the average genz or alpha will not. By literate I mean having a basic understanding of how computers work. Like what a file is, how to find them, what a hard drive or mouse is and does. How to type.

I didn't doubt that the younger Gens will likely run circles around me in terms of programming. Similar to how there were really smart computer literate gen x and boomers.

Yes, as Gen X still into gaming, it is kind of interesting seeing all those remarks about the rise of PC gaming, PC gaming, alongside 8 and 16 bit home computers were all that we had, in Europe almost no one was that into consoles.

They existed surely, with SEGA on the forefront, but not something most households cared about.

Home computers gaming was what the majority of us had.

Well, those wild/creative designs WERE the "practical work tools". Check out the PowerMac G3, this thing looks totally colourful and silly but this was the most powerful machine Apple made at the time: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lhutton/48688728841/ (also dang I still really want one, still haven't found a good deal on one lol)

I owned a G3 that was the last beige box Apple made before that clear plastic Fisher Price looking unit. I didn't mind the colorful iMacs. In my mind, the iMacs were fun things and the colors were okay, but the towers were meant to be serious computers and fun is just not allowed or something moronic. Those towers were just something I never cared for with no real reason. Oh, and the hockey puck mouse that came out around that time. Yuck

or the G4 Cube

There's a cache of them in a storage unit east of Atlanta. You can still find the listing on Facebook marketplace.

I bought a B&W machine from the guy for $50 or $60.

Also grabbed a G4 Digital Audio tower. To my surprise, it was a top-end 733 MHz model.

Oh damn, nice! thanks for the tip. I'm up in Vancouver BC though so kind of a stretch unfortunately

It's reported to be making a comeback with the upcoming HomePod that has screen that can rotate to follow your presence

that's not creepy at all. why would that sound like a good idea that someone would want?

So the screen is clearly visible, no matter which side of the kitchen island you're on?

Especially if the screen is showing a recipe, unit conversion, timers, etc.

If it's silent, that seems like it could be really cool.

Love to see a cylindrical, wraparound screen. (Very silent.)

That's really interesting. Or a hemisphere. And it only lights up in the direction you're looking at it from.

for one, people like to record videos or do video calls without needing someone to hold the phone. they helped ship iphone accessories for this already, recently

another use case is for watching something or interacting with it via voice when your hands are tied up doing something else or from a distance. same value as vision pro without the goggles or isolation

At least Framework released a new Desktop

And they tried to be fun with it!

The 3D printed tiles on the front are a very cool idea and just perfect right now I think! :-)

https://frame.work/au/en/desktop

I also like the colored backs on the 12 inch laptop they announced

To me, that kind of product is what sets Apple apart from other companies in the industry. There's an optimism and playfulnes to that design that is refreshing.

Apple always made things for the users. Microsoft always made things to sell to corporations. Dell always did the same, and their consumer offerings were always a shallow and shitty shell over their corporate ones (and this is STILL true! The alienware towers are generally just an ugly veneer on top of an optiflex case/motherboard LOL).

While that all maybe true. All my Apple kit is dead from a decade or more ago except for the G4 Mac Mini (which is useless btw). The Dell and Thinkpads I have all still work and work quite well and are easy to repair. Repairing Apple stuff is always a nightmare and always more expensive.

The hardware components have become so small that there is no longer a need to design a creative enclosure. All-in-one computers—phone, tablet, or desktop—can now approach the Platonic ideal of that single flat screen.

Except when they can't. A good GPU still won't fit in a flat case that you describe. And things like the current gen imac feel a little pointless as they are basically laptop guts with a larger screen bundled in. I'd rather get a laptop and a second screen for it than one of those.

You might want that, but there are plenty of people who just want to have their computer sit on their desk.

The ironic thing is, when Steve Jobs introduced this form factor, he made a joke about the “obvious” choice just being a flat slab with the computer guts tucked behind the monitor. But Apple would never do something that boring! https://youtu.be/k74NgDbR7gI?si=zEgsUiQazXB5f1dP&t=3777

? he clearly explains that they couldn't place the CD/DVD drive vertically without reducing the read/write speeds by a lot

Anecdotally, the CD/DVD drive in the G5 was super unreliable.

The imac g5 that followed was such a boring and ugly design compared to the G4. There was no mistaking that LOL. I don't think anyone liked it.

It looked good on the inside.

The really should have kept that design around longer, iterated on it.

Maybe it just wasn't possible to put a G5 on that small of a logic board, but it's still an absolutely stunning computer. I have one sitting on my kitchen counter right now!

I'm realizing that there may be people here who are too young to remember how great the ad for this was:

https://youtu.be/b5P3QDm61go?si=eCDEa-9KKjG0b7fQ

The amazing thing is that we currently have all the tech to make that ad work in reality where back when this was shot, it was pure sci-fi.

Whether or not it will ever see the light of day (and what use case it will actually solve) is another question, but it’s basically confirmed that Apple is in fact working on this!

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/19/apple-robot-spotted-in-...

It's wild to me how many very different iMac form factors there were a few years apart. Somehow as a little kid, I remember seeing the iMac G3 and G5 (and the eMac) everywhere but not the iMac G4 until much later. One day was like, wut is that.

> and then the world moved past that

I’m 100% sure it was just too expensive to keep making.

Jobs probably said “price be damned, I love this thing and the manufacturing cost will go down over time” and it didn’t.

Moving the ports from the stand to the back of the display remains the single most baffling decision of the iMac line, regardless of everything else.

The stand is stationary regardless of the display angle and way more conducive to stable cable management. The last few generations of iMac made removing the stand technically not a user-serviceable action, so manufacturing USB-hub stand risers custom-fit to iMacs is practically its own industry.

A device still bound by mandates to be unnecessarily thin and light, and with an arbitrarily non-removable stand, can still make the stand a few centimeters thicker, run a fixed line from the logic board and into the stand, and put some or all of the ports inside it.

Hell, go wild and make the bottom of the stand a full inch thick, and you could put a user-accessible m.2 port in it,[1] but that damages the justification for upcharging $200 to add 256GB of storage.

1: https://www.amazon.com/PULWTOP-Adapter-Accessories-Docking-I...

"there is noticeable color banding on the screen"

The LCD panel in the G4 iMac is only 6 bits per pixel, compared to 10 bits per pixel on a modern Macbook Pro or similar, so the banding is just the dithering required to display the gradient shadow

Really? Apple sold the device as capable of displaying "millions of colors" which you don't get to with 6 bits per pixel.

You do with temporal dithering

Was going to post this too. It was a popular technique for getting ‘more colors’ out of lower bit depth panels.

Weirdly hard to find out with a web search if his was done on the iMac G4 (your comment is already one of the top results for me on Google and DDG!).

Thousands and “millions of colors” in the control panel came from the CRT days. Guess they didn’t have the heart to reduce that just because the display device didn’t fully support it.

It's the difference between 16 bits per pixel and 32 bits per pixel in VRAM.

A screen using 18 bits per pixel (6 bits per color) would need the 'millions of colors' mode unless Apple designed some clever hack.

Yes, it's an LG LM171W02-TTA1 which is a 6-bit TN panel; most (all?) TN panels of that era were 6-bit at best, so it could only display ~256k colors

It sounds like you're disagreeing, but GP is right per https://support.apple.com/en-us/112313

> 15-inch (viewable) TFT active-matrix LCD, 1024 by 768 pixels, millions of colors

I'm not super familiar with macs, but AFAICT that's the product being described here.

It's most definitely a LM171W02 panel in the iMac G4 which is definitely a 6-bit panel, you can see the specs here: https://www.panelook.com/modelsearch.php?keyword=LM171W02&se... all of the LM171W02 panel family are 6-bit (notice the colors column lists 262k)

Edit: I see you linked to the entire G4 lineup specs. The 15" is a LM151X2 and also has only 262k colors: https://www.panelook.com/modelsearch.php?keyword=LM151X2&sea...

but the 20" is a LM201U04 with an IPS panel that could display millions of colors with 8 bits per channel https://www.panelook.com/modelsearch.php?keyword=LM201U04&se...

so we can assume that Apple is simply using dithering to count as "millions of colors" on the lower models

Okay fair enough, but then... did Apple just straight up lie about the specs?

I wouldn't say they lied so much as they obfuscated the truth; the machine supported millions of colors, and with dithering techniques the monitor could look like it was displaying quite a lot of colors, but only the 20" display could display millions of colors without dithering (which was just like basically every other TN-based machine and display of the time)

The "millions of colors" was a part of a lawsuit by some photographers who found out it wasn't actually millions.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/26/apple_settles_mil...

Ah! Okay, that explains the dissonance.

Thank you for the clarification.

> so the banding is just the dithering required to display

I know what you're trying to say, but this sounds weird. Dithering is a technique employed to PREVENT banding, it does not cause banding.

BTW, this site has the flying toaster screensaver if you leave it open long enough. Nice easter egg!

Glad I saw I wasn't the only one who found this. Nice easter egg indeed!!

I came to share the news as well, I see there are some other multi-taskers here!

Also came to report the same! A wonderful retro flashback to cheer me up this morning.

seem using this web lib/app https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/

I had one of these! I think the common nicknames were “lampshade” or “half dome” at the time. I wrote my graduate thesis on it.

It was a very capable Mac that could even play 3D games smoothly - Wolfenstein and a bundled game for kids about escaped aliens who crash landed out west.

One of the best features was the swivel screen, which you could easily whip around to show something to someone else in the room.

I've often heard it called "Luxo Jr.", after the Pixar short https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3O60o5U7w

Made particular sense since Steve was majority shareholder of Pixar as well at the time.

Still have a 15" 1.25GHz iMac G4 on my desk, still works, runs Tiger. I mostly use it as a terminal and for Classic apps, but it does very well at both. Occasionally it plays DVDs or music CDs for the kitchen with a set of Pro Speakers.

This was my favorite iMac design.

For a (somewhat) short period of time, school/college computer labs were awesome to walk into. It was fun seeing tons of multi colored G3's.

I was in nearly the sweet spot for this in school computer labs as a kid so it felt like a long time to me. They only started to get boring looking when I graduated from high school.

Conveniently color-coded so you could tell at a glance which were the older crappier ones!

At my school they all had Netscape navigator. So slow.

We called it nutscrape

Me too https://www.leisuretown.com/library/qac/25.html

Okay, but we were like 11 years old, so I don't think you got me there

I'm not trying to “get” anybody? I did it too lol

I'm kinda split between it and the original G3 range (slot loading preferably, but in the original bright transparent colours before it got weird with stuff like "blue Dalmatian"). The anglepoise Mac is kinda near beginning of the rather sterile Apple aesthetic that has never gone away, but it's also incredibly neat in a packaging sense that a CRT could never be. I kinda want a combination, but I'm not sure if you could get away with the colour bits on an all-in-one without the large area needed for the CRT neck...

The Blue and White PowerMac G3 is my ultimate best looking Mac, there's something about the giant G3 on the sides, and the bold colours for what is a "professional" system. Sadly it all got toned down for the G4...

The G3 were cool in a different way. I miss the playful coloring of late 90s devices. Computers grew up but did we also need our game consoles to become soulless rip offs of Apple industrial design?

Edit: I want a translucent atomic purple phone damnit!

It was late 90s / early 2000s specifically, right? N64 was colorful, GameCube a bit less, but not the SNES, Genesis, NES, etc. Kinda the same with the Mac GUIs.

Yea I'd say like 95 until 2001ish. Then everything got serious.

Yeah, I have two of the G4's and while they are really nice, I'd love a PowerMac G3 sometime. I have G5's as well, and again they are cool, but not in the way the G3 was -- just so striking and IMO creativity-inspiring.

As a owner of both slot load and tray load G3's, I strongly prefer the tray loaders. The drives still work, while I have to jam a credit card with double-sided tape into the drive to get a disc out of the slot load drive.

The best part of this design was that it felt so nice. Just playing with the monitor adjustment was so satisfying and felt like such a high quality product. Almost made up for the mouse. Almost.

Wow that docklite is amazing. Not supporting screen of on blanking is a stupid oversight though.

Unfortunately my G4 iMac suffers from the lame arm issue which affects most of them at this age. And it's difficult and kinda dangerous to fix (a huuuge amount of tension on the spring).

I bought one used because it was such a beautiful machine. Most beautiful Mac ever.

If I could choose only one computer design to have for the rest of my life, it would be this one. So cool. I hope jcs sold the spare parts or is otherwise hanging onto them for future use/donation/sale (rather than scrapping them). Parts for older computers are harder to find every day, unsurprisingly.

This is exactly the type of project I would love to do to my 2017 27" iMac Retina 5k. It's getting a bit slow, so I would love to salvage the beautiful screen and drive it with a new mini. But alas I can't find any similar kits like the Juicy Crumb Docklite.

What is so difficult about allowing that screen to be powered by another computer? Apple is really crazy, because I know that screen costs a fortune.

When that Mac was first released, there was literally no external connection that would let you drive that display.

HDMI and DP at the time didn't have enough bandwidth to support 5k60.

https://stonetaskin.com/products/diy-5k-universal-r1811-v-4-...

Looks like you can do that for $200-$300.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1f9s8kk/comment/luquux...

I have one of the first 5K iMacs from 2014. I contemplated doing a similar project but I don't really want to destroy a perfectly fine computer. It doesn't run the latest OS, but it still runs the latest Chrome though. I often use it to SSH into a more powerful machine for coding, and I occasionally use remote desktop.

If Google decides not to support this for Chrome, I'll firewall it from the internet but still plan to use it as an SSH machine.

no reason computers couldn't have personality again

These are some of my favorite macs.

Would be REALLY cool to see a mod where the shell supported a Mac Mini AND a DVD Drive

Would really love to put a series of Diablo 2 discs into this, or Warcraft 3, and play

4x Resolution bump. 40x Computing bump. Nice upgrade!

(3840 x 2400)/(1440 x 900) = 7.1111111111x. At retina this would be like using a normal 109dpi screen with 20% smaller pixels. squints

This is certainly fun and that iMac definitely has a cool design, but I'll keep my 27+ inch monitor and 4k (or better yet Retina)..

An iMac G4 was our families first computer. I've always regret not saving it. The design still feels completely timeless.

This is so cool. Makes me want to do it. The working Mac plus is giving me more motivation to fix the Lisa I have dormant.

The best part of this is the "screensaver" that kicks in on the webpage when you leave it idle for a few minutes.

i feel like this imac design is a kind of statement somehow... its interesting that apple at their most desperate was so risk-taking and bold with designs, but now when they are so successful the boldness is more on the inside (m1, neural engine etc) than outside....

Desktops provided a lot more room to try things. Now that everything is laptops it’s pretty clear why you might want to just make a very simple design.

Apple did make the trashcan Mac Pro, but of course that ended up having problems and was made at just the wrong time. The newer models harken back to the cheese graters but with fancier holes and a smaller overall size.

A new version of that Mac as an iMac with a bigger screen would be amazing. But given screen sizes maybe it would need a really heavy weighted base to survive well.

Funny enough Microsoft of all companies has been a bit more creative with hardware designs lately with the SurfaceBook, Surface Laptop Studio, and Surface Studio lines. Of course they aren't without their issues

I'd say it's the shift from the Apple trying bold things to grab the attention and not go under (with Jobs as the CEO) to the current Apple just trying to keep the status quo and positive reviews.

They snapped an iPad on top of a HomePod. Either we’re all fools, or their design language is that good where they can just build things like legos. Ives is a genius (hope I’m attributing it to the right person).

The iMac G4 is still the coolest looking computer IMO

Dope idea. Retro computing thats actually usable!

This computer is older than my graduate student...

Why was the Mac's keyboard so chubby?

The one depicted in the first photo is from ~1984, which might explain the relative chonkiness of it (all computer hardware back then was pretty thicc). Unless you mean some newer model that isn't shown in the post?

well-tempered sophistication, great result. thank you

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