I bought a PowerMac G3 (from ebay, about 15 years ago) and while it was not very powerful, the thing was just fun to work with. I ran Linux and had added all kinds of PCI cards like old analog TV tuner card and SATA RAID card to run it as NAS. And the case was very beautiful. I'm not sure how they did it, but Apple and Steve Jobs made plastic look very pleasing to the eyes. Afterward, I also saw someone's PowerMac G4 in person and that thing looked incredibly nice, especially the mirror finish. These macs looked better in real life than in photos. I never got the G4, and I wish I still had that G3.

The FW400 MDDs are great for OS 9. I bought my dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 new specifically because it could still boot 9.2.2. Later I put a 1.8GHz Sonnet upgrade in it, and it's still my main Mac OS 9 development system. It also still sounds like a windtunnel.

I was able to find a decent high CFM main system fan that... still sounds like a wind tunnel, but only a little.

I remember my Dad had the first G5 with the new thermal architecture, with everything blowing through the front cheese grater grill. That was much better for the components, and blissfully quiet at idle at least.

The MDD is the last Macintosh capable of natively running Mac OS 9. (Although, only just. It came with a special build that was just for the MDD.)

The fans in it are also astoundingly loud, and was often given the nickname of the "wind tunnel" Mac, because of the holes in the front.

I have a slightly older Power Mac G4, a 350MHz "Yikes!" PCI Power Mac G4 from 1999 (https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/) that I purchased in 2009 for $40 while I was a senior at Cal Poly. The reason I got it for only $40 was because it had a broken hard drive, but the sellers didn't know that. I was able to replace the hard drive with one that was given away by Cal Poly's computer science department, which sometimes gave away old computer parts. I also replaced the non-working optical drive with a new DVD+RW drive, and I upgraded the RAM; IIRC, it has 640MB RAM.

Even though the computer was already obsolete in 2009 (I used a 2006 Core Duo MacBook as my daily driver, which ran circles around the old Power Mac G4), it was a capable machine that could run Mac OS X Leopard and could handle the Web of that era, even YouTube videos. Eventually, sometime around 2013 the Web became too much for my Power Mac G4, but it remains a very nice machine for Mac OS 9 and early Mac OS X retrocomputing. I now have faster PowerPC Macs in my collection (a 1GHz PowerBook G4 and a 1.25GHz Mac Mini G4), but my Power Mac G4 is the fastest machine in my collection that could run the classic Mac OS without any modifications, and it is also the fastest Mac in my collection that has expansion slots.

I'm keeping an eye on 2019 Mac Pro prices (I own a 2013 Mac Pro, which I purchased refurbished in 2017 and used as my daily driver until 2022, when I switched to a Ryzen 3900 build). I love the aesthetic, but they're pricey since they are still quite capable Macs despite the transition to ARM. Once they drop to under $500, I plan to buy one and add it to my collection.

Update: I found my old blog post about my Power Mac G4: https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-power-mac-...

I also have a "trash can" mac, and I'm not sure what to do with it.

It runs linux great, and with 12 cores, 32G of RAM- it could be an extremely capable server. If not for the minuscule SSD.

It also draws a fair amount from the wall (98W~), which is probably the dual GPU's not having power control with Linux.

If only Thunderbolt 2 drive enclosures would come down in price a little.

Eitherway, I share your enthusiasm for the Intel "cheese grater" Mac Pros', those have got to be effectively e-waste to most people soon and I'd love to hoard some for myself.

Admittedly my "trash can" Mac sees little use these days. I thought I'd miss macOS a lot when I switched to Windows in 2022, but it turns out that I could live without it, though I do have a work-issued MacBook Pro, and so in a sense I never truly left the Mac ecosystem. It's kind of hard talking about being a user of one particular OS when I work with Windows, macOS, and Linux weekly and with FreeBSD occasionally.

Regarding the 2019 Mac Pro, I just took a cursory look on eBay for 2019 Mac Pro models, and it appears they are still going for over $1,000. macOS still supports the 2019 Mac Pro, though its days are numbered since Apple usually has a 6-7 year window for supporting Macs.

I believe there are two main reasons why the Mac Pro is still so expensive despite the fact that a M4 Mac Mini would outperform it:

1. RAM. Not only does the 2019 Mac Pro support DIMMs, but it also supports a gigantic amount of RAM: 768GB on models with 8-16 cores, and 1.5TB on models with 24 or 28 cores (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102742). No ARM Mac supports this much RAM. This makes the 2019 Mac Pro a nice machine for very RAM-intensive tasks that require Mac software.

2. The 2019 Mac Pro has expansion slots, though the 2023 Mac Pro also has expansion slots.

Had a lot of fun reading that.

I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to technology, truth be told there's a certain rose tinted nostalgia that I get from thinking about early 00's technology.

It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy- that anything related to actual computation or internet was jank and slow, but it had a whiff of a hopeful future about it. Every PC upgrade made things more snappy back then... Now I dread upgrades.

Hey ho.

It's endearing to know that one more bit of early 00's technology has been given a new lease on life. Would be cool to write some native software for it!

Funny timing, I also bought a Mac today - an SE/30. Looking forward to fixing it up.

Congrats. Recap first - they're probably already shot. Once it's in working order, they're great little workhorses. In undergraduate, the local Mac fileserver was a very hardworking SE/30. I managed to loot its entire contents before they decommissioned it.

You'll need a case cracker and a tool specifically to de-energise the CRT: that's the killer part.

$50 is decent enough for the case alone. The penguin may not be disgraced yet, I wonder if you can boot linux on it. I know gentoo and a lot of other distros support powerpc

IME NetBSD or OpenBSD are better supported options on New World Macs. I run NetBSD/macppc on a G4 Mac mini and it "just works" (tm).

There was Yellow Dog Linux, back then.

Fun fact yum comes from yellow dog

I've got a bit set to try and revive my old G4. I want to see if I can boot MorphOS on it.

My 2004 17" PowerBook G4 starts right up. But it can't do much.