Thread
50 G4 Minis (not mine)
Here's what someone needs:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-Of-50-Apple-Mac-Mini-1-25GHz-512-MB-40-GB-HD-W-Power-Adapters-ONLY-100-LEFT-/161464162711?pt=US_Wholesale_Desktop_Computers&hash=item2598039997
$1250 is a lot of money, but it's only $25 per Mini and they come with the power adapters...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-Of-50-Apple-Mac-Mini-1-25GHz-512-MB-40-GB-HD-W-Power-Adapters-ONLY-100-LEFT-/161464162711?pt=US_Wholesale_Desktop_Computers&hash=item2598039997
$1250 is a lot of money, but it's only $25 per Mini and they come with the power adapters...
I was looking at that, but factor in a few hundred more for freight shipping and it's not such a great deal.
How much time and effort would it take to snag them, clean them, store them, inspect them, install an OS, and sell them for a profit (are they worth much anymore)?
Maybe at $10 a pop delivered it would be worth it assuming you want to keep a few of them for yourself.
Maybe at $10 a pop delivered it would be worth it assuming you want to keep a few of them for yourself.
If they where in the UK (and I had the money) I would totally snag them But then the G4 Mini's are a great love of mine - A referb 1.25ghz mini was my first ever computer
No idea what I would do with them, perhaps build a really slow and inefficient cluster computer...
But then the G4 Mini's are a great love of mine - A referb 1.25ghz mini was my first ever computerNo idea what I would do with them, perhaps build a really slow and inefficient cluster computer...
The best way to get a deal like that would probably be to watch a government auction. Schools near me are clearing out of G4 iBooks, powermacs, imacs, and minis by the boatload... I think the lot of minis went for around $15 each. That's probably where this guy got his.
something like these are what you should look for: https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=15&acctid=6543
https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=1&acctid=7060
https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=788&acctid=4788
I don't have $27,000.
I think that is a fair deal for those mini's
Just not really sure what one would do with all this G4 mini's
I guess it would be super cool if someone could hack Mac os9 native on one of those... man it would scream.
Just not really sure what one would do with all this G4 mini's
I guess it would be super cool if someone could hack Mac os9 native on one of those... man it would scream.
If they were dead, you could use them to make some kind of wall...
I still want a G4 Mini. They're cute. But I want the rare 1.5GHz version with the 64MB VRAM.
I still want a G4 Mini. They're cute. But I want the rare 1.5GHz version with the 64MB VRAM.
I wouldn't pay $500 for the lot. Minis are cool but G4 minis are almost impossible to sell now because they're so slow.
i use to oc the 1.2 and 1.4 version to 1.57 - 1.58 there are some resistors you have to rearange.
They're not that slow. They run Leopard pretty well, particularly if you add one of those adapters which lets you add a 2.5" SATA drive in place of the DVD drive. I have one running Leopard which can play full screen Hulu very well and which still gets used for Final Cut 6 sometimes. They also make excellent little machines for running NetBSD.
They are worthless now, but in 10 years people will want them for running old apps and PPC games since they are small. Problem is predicting what will be worth money 10 years from now and storing that stuff so it won't rust (if you like to speculate more then collect and use). Now If they could play NETFLIX in HD people would love them.
About a year ago, I received about 25 Mac Mini G4s from my wife's school - they were going to the bin and were previously used for things like propping up tables higher (!), unfortunately only a few power bricks came with the haul. I ended up giving away many of them to fellow local Mac nuts as they really are slow little things compared to equivalently-specced desktop G4s, but cool to those who wanted a small PPC machine.
The ones I sold were the "silent revision" 1.5Ghz models, they went quickly, most of them to Amiga fans who wanted to run MorphOS. I did give MorphOS a try on my saved souped-up Mini (overclocked to 1.83Ghz, 1GB, 7200RPM 2.5" HD), it is quite an interesting OS to learn.
50 of the lowest-specced units, presumably with horrible 4200RPM 40GB drives and 512MB RAM will be hard to sell.
JB
The ones I sold were the "silent revision" 1.5Ghz models, they went quickly, most of them to Amiga fans who wanted to run MorphOS. I did give MorphOS a try on my saved souped-up Mini (overclocked to 1.83Ghz, 1GB, 7200RPM 2.5" HD), it is quite an interesting OS to learn.
50 of the lowest-specced units, presumably with horrible 4200RPM 40GB drives and 512MB RAM will be hard to sell.
JB
I guess you could use them and set up a Apple Xgrid cluster. I always thought that would be a cool thing to try at a larger scale.
I wanted a Mac Mini for the longest time. friend up in Ontario acquired a bunch from the school district and locked them up inside his office. he did have fun trashing the eMacs being retired at the same time, however... so big that they didn't even fit in the largest garbage cans the school had-- so they went straight into the dumpster after being stripped of hard drives, RAM and DVD drives. I'm told they made satisfying, heavy crunches as they piled up. (don't worry, they were the horrible 700MHz ones.)
From what I understand, he still has them in his office, to this day, in a neat stack of about 10-15 of them or so. they're most likely the 1.25 model because schools are cheap, but I used to want one of them badly. ended up getting a late 2009 high-end Intel Mac Mini and upgraded that to max specs (which for the hard drive has a new max of 2TB now and I'm still on a 1TB drive for it...!) so I haven't really asked about them much.
there IS a market out there for the mac mini's, but they won't move in large numbers for at least another few years. G3 stuff is starting to get expensive now as supply dries up, and G4 towers are going for 200 a pop on fleabay.
it's also my understanding there's a Mac-oriented community of audio people with old music gear that has drivers only for MacOS 9, that's usable otherwise aside from that. I think there's some OSX stuff mixed in there too-- but I'm not sure if those require PCI slots to take advantage of or if that's USB/Firewire stuff that a Mac Mini could handle. most I have for Mac audio equipment is a 3rd revision (pre-white box) Griffin iMic.
From what I understand, he still has them in his office, to this day, in a neat stack of about 10-15 of them or so. they're most likely the 1.25 model because schools are cheap, but I used to want one of them badly. ended up getting a late 2009 high-end Intel Mac Mini and upgraded that to max specs (which for the hard drive has a new max of 2TB now and I'm still on a 1TB drive for it...!) so I haven't really asked about them much.
there IS a market out there for the mac mini's, but they won't move in large numbers for at least another few years. G3 stuff is starting to get expensive now as supply dries up, and G4 towers are going for 200 a pop on fleabay.
it's also my understanding there's a Mac-oriented community of audio people with old music gear that has drivers only for MacOS 9, that's usable otherwise aside from that. I think there's some OSX stuff mixed in there too-- but I'm not sure if those require PCI slots to take advantage of or if that's USB/Firewire stuff that a Mac Mini could handle. most I have for Mac audio equipment is a 3rd revision (pre-white box) Griffin iMic.
G4 tower pricing varies greatly, it's odd.
They make great brains for MAME machines. Finding the DVI->Composite video adapters is the hard part. 
It's sort of ironic that 10 year old long-discontinued Apple hardware actually benchmarks just as well on most tests as a $3,000 AmigaONE X1000. I love Amiga-People, don't get me wrong, but... guys, it really is time to give up. Obviously Hyperion would be shooting what's left of the Amiga hardware development scene straight in the foot if they ported the "real" AmigaOS 4.0 to run on leftover Apple hardware instead of whatever harebrained scheme they have in the pipe now (Apparently there's an "X5000" in the works using PPC chips designed to power network routers... which I positively guarantee aren't going to be particularly impressive running a general-purpose OS) but it's nonetheless pretty sad.
(As an aside, the X1000's performance may also shed some additional light on why Apple dumped PPC for Intel. The machine uses the PWRficient CPU core that was pretty much Apple's only other option besides IBM's wares if they'd stuck with POWER. Clock for clock it looks worse than the G4; granted, being used for AmigaOS *really* puts it in a bad light because there's essentially *zero* multiprocessor support, but even if you double the usable core count it's still not exactly "blow you to the back of the auditorium" performance compared to *anything* in Intel's catalog post-NetBurst.)
Such a G4 would also be a nice bsd or linux shell system for a small number of users. I'm between local shell hosts, but my most recent such machine was a 1.4GHz Pentium M with 768MB of memory and a 250GB spinning disk. That machine received an upgrade to 1.5GB of memory pretty recently.
For that kind of task, not much other than that the machine is relatively small and quiet matters.
Xgrid cluster would be really interesting use for such a group of machines, the biggest challenge is that the G4 mini only has 10/100 networking, which I seem to recall back in the day meant that your money was usually better spent on fewer bigger systems to do your task, though it would sort of depend on how the network is used by your particular task. (i.e. if it's really a distribution method for tasks that take a long time to run, the way SETI et al work, or if it needs really intense network access, which I'm told a lot of xgrid tasks like video rendering and distributed xcode compiles require.)
It would be neat to look at either way.
For that kind of task, not much other than that the machine is relatively small and quiet matters.
Xgrid cluster would be really interesting use for such a group of machines, the biggest challenge is that the G4 mini only has 10/100 networking, which I seem to recall back in the day meant that your money was usually better spent on fewer bigger systems to do your task, though it would sort of depend on how the network is used by your particular task. (i.e. if it's really a distribution method for tasks that take a long time to run, the way SETI et al work, or if it needs really intense network access, which I'm told a lot of xgrid tasks like video rendering and distributed xcode compiles require.)
It would be neat to look at either way.
For a long time I wanted to use a G4 Mini as the back up server in my house. I spent a bunch of time looking at schemes for putting gigabit ethernet in the thing. Nothing was going to be particularly good. The most promising avenue of research was to reverse engineer the pin out of Apple's Mini-PCI slot by comparing broadcom wifi cards for the mini to PCI wifi cards with the same chipset, then create a card with a Realtek 8169 on board using the pinout I would have discovered.
I still hadn't figured out how to bring the ethernet cable out of the machine when I bought another Mini (to experiment on) on Ebay, and it turned out to be a 2010 C2D Mini instead of a G4 (the description was kind of vague). At that point, I abandoned the whole scheme.
If the goal of this thread was to make me want a G4 Mini, it's succeeding.
I assume you're talking about using this Xgrid for some sort of "historical" task; Xgrid as a technology has been dead for a while now. To be kind to the idea, I guess, going by GeekBench 2 results 50 Mac Minis (with an average score of around 800) would, with their aggregate score of 40,000, add up to around 40% more processing power than a 2013 Mac Pro with a single 12 core Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2. (Geekbench of around 28,000.) Since that CPU alone sells for north of two grand the pile of Minis must be one heck of a deal, right?
(Spoiler: there's a *lot* wrong with the math there.)
Well, Xgrid can be used on OS X 10.4 - 10.7, so its not exactly ancient technology; or at least its several decades newer than most other topics discussed here
Interesting read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgrid
Edit: It looks to me that the performance of the controlling computer has to increase with relationship to the size of the cluster/complexity of computations, since
its task is to distribute the work and assemble the returned results.
Interesting read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgrid
Edit: It looks to me that the performance of the controlling computer has to increase with relationship to the size of the cluster/complexity of computations, since
its task is to distribute the work and assemble the returned results.
Odd you got gigabit Ethernet back in the stone age of G4 towers but the much newer G4 mini is just 10/100.
It was Apple's way of making it low-end (and cheap) - I have towers well into the late Vista era with 10/100 only (and 6150SE chipsets, yuck)
I just sold one of my Minis (a CoreDuo 1.83 GHz Late 2006) to Elfen, and I intend to eventually get a 2009 Mini or something (just to have, since they're so handy). Maybe a G4 as well, mostly because, as this thread has pointed out, they're getting cheap enough, and they're old and slow and common enough, that people practically can't give them away (it seems).
And, if anybody ever gets OS 9 running natively on one, I'd be super happy (they take up so much less space than a G4 tower).
c
And, if anybody ever gets OS 9 running natively on one, I'd be super happy (they take up so much less space than a G4 tower).
c
Xgrid was a neat idea, but it seems like a lot of the need for that particular type of computing on the Mac has since died off a little bit. I think XCode may still be able to do distributed compiles, but the new trend seems to be using a Mini or Mac Pro as an xcode server, and let that machine take care of version control, automated building, and certain testing processes.
It's probably one of the few reasons I'd recommend somebody run an OS X Server at all today.
From a product and platform perspective I was really happy with Apple at that time, it's just that most of the hardware was woefully underperforming compared to literally everything else in the industry, it looks even worse if you compare it to one-generation-newer Macs running Intel processors, and to older Pentium 4s.
Just as a sort of fun figure, the 1.67GHz G4 in the last-generation PowerBook G4 (shipping in early 2006) scores the same on cinebench as the 1.8GHz ThinkPad T30, shipping in late 2002. There was a 2.4GHz processor available for the T30 as well.
That era, with Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 and that hardware was sort of when Apple started to really come into their current selves as selling a series of "application appliances", and I sort of wonder if we're not seeing a similar thing today with the Mac OS X 10.10 issues where even though the "requirements" aren't increasing, the amount of horsepower you realistically need to run the software well is increasing. (pure conjecture and I don't know if this is actually true of 10.10.)
In the phone and tablet markets, Apple has been very careful not to talk about specifications. HTC has always listed "528MHz ARM processor!" on their phones, and Apple never has, even though their desktop computers had specific specs. Apple's moving in this direction, simply referring to the CPU in the MacBook Air as the "i5" instead of the i5-4560U, which is what you'd see listed on Dell's or Lenovo's web site. (Not that either of them build anything with that CPU, which I consider to be a shame, but that's another issue.)
Similarly though, 2005-2009 was when Apple started shedding a lot of products. The Xserve RAID for example, was a(n aging) component of an Apple-centric infrastructure for organizations that was not necessarily needed very much once Apple's only on-prem "enterprise" application, PowerSchool (which was only ever "barely" theirs anyway) was shed in 2006. Mac OS X Server was never that great at what it claimed to do, it did it, but the whole point of it seemed to be this on-premise appliance that Apple has deemed is no longer necessary, at least in the form it existed in 10.6 and earlier.
Apple always gets compared to a UNIX workstation vendor and the mac mini and iMac are great "unix chores" boxes to succeed the NeXTstation, Sun SPARCstation series and low end SGIs and DECs like the Indy, Fuel, and DS10, but I definitely wonder whether or not they were also trying to get in at higher levels. (I mean, there was, for example, the Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics, which was essentially a pile of xserves, an Ethernet switch and a UPS in a rack, which you could argue competed with some pretty big systems from SGI, Sun, HPQ (three platforms) and IBM at the time.)
Somewhere, there's a computing alt-history fanfic for an Apple and DEC that got together and bought Be, resulting in Alpha based Macs that were fast and ran a pretty great-looking reimaginging of OpenVMS. That's another thread, though.
The eMac G4 is probably a better comparison, those cost $799 and $999, but also still had 10/100 Ethernet and otherwise extremely similar hardware ot the mini, and was 2005's 1.4GHz ULV iMac to the much more powerful iMac G5s.
The last generation of Power Macintosh G4s cost slightly less than the Power Macintosh G5, but those were probably getting cheap to make by the end of their run.
It's probably one of the few reasons I'd recommend somebody run an OS X Server at all today.
Tangentially, 1.42GHz eMac G4 decked to the gills (2GB, big disk) is probably one of my top personal picks for a fast PowerPC machine. My PowerBook G4 was probably enough PowerPC laptop for a lifetime, but those eMacs had nice speakers, pretty good CRT displays, and just a unique overall appearance.
From a product and platform perspective I was really happy with Apple at that time, it's just that most of the hardware was woefully underperforming compared to literally everything else in the industry, it looks even worse if you compare it to one-generation-newer Macs running Intel processors, and to older Pentium 4s.
Just as a sort of fun figure, the 1.67GHz G4 in the last-generation PowerBook G4 (shipping in early 2006) scores the same on cinebench as the 1.8GHz ThinkPad T30, shipping in late 2002. There was a 2.4GHz processor available for the T30 as well.
That era, with Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 and that hardware was sort of when Apple started to really come into their current selves as selling a series of "application appliances", and I sort of wonder if we're not seeing a similar thing today with the Mac OS X 10.10 issues where even though the "requirements" aren't increasing, the amount of horsepower you realistically need to run the software well is increasing. (pure conjecture and I don't know if this is actually true of 10.10.)
In the phone and tablet markets, Apple has been very careful not to talk about specifications. HTC has always listed "528MHz ARM processor!" on their phones, and Apple never has, even though their desktop computers had specific specs. Apple's moving in this direction, simply referring to the CPU in the MacBook Air as the "i5" instead of the i5-4560U, which is what you'd see listed on Dell's or Lenovo's web site. (Not that either of them build anything with that CPU, which I consider to be a shame, but that's another issue.)
Similarly though, 2005-2009 was when Apple started shedding a lot of products. The Xserve RAID for example, was a(n aging) component of an Apple-centric infrastructure for organizations that was not necessarily needed very much once Apple's only on-prem "enterprise" application, PowerSchool (which was only ever "barely" theirs anyway) was shed in 2006. Mac OS X Server was never that great at what it claimed to do, it did it, but the whole point of it seemed to be this on-premise appliance that Apple has deemed is no longer necessary, at least in the form it existed in 10.6 and earlier.
Apple always gets compared to a UNIX workstation vendor and the mac mini and iMac are great "unix chores" boxes to succeed the NeXTstation, Sun SPARCstation series and low end SGIs and DECs like the Indy, Fuel, and DS10, but I definitely wonder whether or not they were also trying to get in at higher levels. (I mean, there was, for example, the Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics, which was essentially a pile of xserves, an Ethernet switch and a UPS in a rack, which you could argue competed with some pretty big systems from SGI, Sun, HPQ (three platforms) and IBM at the time.)
Somewhere, there's a computing alt-history fanfic for an Apple and DEC that got together and bought Be, resulting in Alpha based Macs that were fast and ran a pretty great-looking reimaginging of OpenVMS. That's another thread, though.
At the time of its introduction, the least expensive Power Macintosh cost over three times what the mini did. The iMac G5 (which might have had Gigabit) cost nearly three times what the mini did, probably 2.7 times.
The eMac G4 is probably a better comparison, those cost $799 and $999, but also still had 10/100 Ethernet and otherwise extremely similar hardware ot the mini, and was 2005's 1.4GHz ULV iMac to the much more powerful iMac G5s.
The last generation of Power Macintosh G4s cost slightly less than the Power Macintosh G5, but those were probably getting cheap to make by the end of their run.
Just to pick a nit: Classic mode is "native" -- it's just boxed into Mac OS X, and a system that "boots" OS 9 is no more native than one that's running classic, it just has fewer other things to fight with, both in terms of application software running reliably and consistently and in terms of the system's resources.
Plus, if somebody does get OS 9 booting directly on a G4 mini, it'll likely be missing platform drivers, making it unstable, or GPU/ethernet/sound drivers, making it unfun to use.