Apple iMac G4 Review

Grab life by the neck.

I typically give Apple a lot of crap for a number of things, namely their general lack of innovation and their attempts at breaking standards but I've always held a curiosity for their old hardware. You know, before missing headphone jacks and shitty laptop keyboards. Apple's old hardware was strange, yet they we're very capable compared to the hordes of terrible Windows machines that existed back in the 90's and early 2000's. One particular model caught my eye in particular, and to satisfy my curiosity on the matter I drove an hour out of my way to pick this up: an iMac G4 and to say the least I've never used anything quite like it.

The "All-in-One" before it was cool.

The iMac G4 was made to replace the aging iMac G3 as the age of flat panel displays was looming. Like all iMacs the G4 is an all-in-one style PC but it's unique in that all the hardware was mounted in the base instead of with the screen. This was because Apple didn't have the technology to successfully vertically mount all the hardware with the monitor so they chucked everything in this bizarre dome shaped base instead. And when I mean bizarre, I mean like I've never seen anything like it before. The base has a relatively compact footprint; it's a little over 10" inches in diameter yet it packs everything from the motherboard to the CD-ROM drive into it and it all seems to be cooled by a single fan which is pretty damn impressive.

Now with clear panels so you can see all the crumbs.

My G4 came with a keyboard and a mouse. I don't think these were the original G4 peripherals; they look like they came off the newer G5, but they are Apple products so the experience is still genuine here. The keyboard is this beefy thing clad in clear plastic with mid-profile membrane keys and two USB ports in the back. It's layout is generally the same as regular Windows keyboards but with some notable differences such as the Function keys going from 1 to 16 and the volume and eject buttons on the top right since there are no face buttons on the G4 apart from power which is in the back. It's keys feel stiffer than most membrane keyboards I've used but it's solidly built and nice to type on overall.

It still likes to think it has one button.

The strangely named Mighty Mouse is one of the weird byproducts of Steve Jobs hatred for multi-button mice. The compromise was a mouse that looked like it had one button but used sensors under the body to act like it had several(Even though there are two physical buttons on the sides of the mouse). Because of this, you have to actually lift your left finger off the mouse in order to right click, otherwise it always registers it as the left click. You also get a scroll ball, which works fine until it gets clogged up with dirt. It's a weird mouse but it works well enough.

Ports!

The G4 came in three flavors, a 15" inch screen, a 17" inch screen, and my particular model, the apparently uncommon 20" inch screen. Interestingly enough depending on when the computer was made and what size screen it has can tell you about what kind of hardware it has inside. The 20" inch model which as sold for less than a year packs a 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4-7445 processor, 256 MB of RAM(Mine was upgraded to 1.25 GB), and an ancient 80 GB hard drive. Graphics are powered by a nVidia GeForce FX 5200 and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hare optional. You get three USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire ports, Ethernet and Modem ports, plus the totally not necessary audio jacks. A toaster by today's standard would have more power than this thing. Like most Macs go, self-maintenance is a more daunting task than it is with most Windows machines. The only easily user accessible part is steel plate at the bottom of the base which house the Wi-Fi card and the RAM cards and anything beyond that is going to be significantly different than most standard computer guts. Sure, you have the basic components like the IDE hard drive and whatnot but try cramming all that into a case that sure as hell isn't ATX standard.

Blargh.

So far the only major hardware issue I'm experiencing with the G4 is that the CD-ROM drive just refuses to read disks; DVDs, old Mac games I had lying around, you name it, it failed. The drive would try to read it for about 30 seconds and then spat the disk back out. This is apparently a common problem with old Mac SuperDrives and it's usually because they get clogged up with dirt over the years and need a cleaning or they're just completely shot for who the hell knows what reason. For how cheap I got this G4, I can't really complain and replacements on eBay seem to be reasonable but the last thing I want to do is tear open a Mac without some prior knowledge of it's internals first. I'm quite sure this thing wasn't totally intended to be serviced at home.

The adjustable neck is fantastic... seriously.

Despite it's obviously dated hardware, the display is where the G4 really comes into it's own. The 20" inch LCD display boasts a 1680 x 1050 resolution and it honestly looks great, even today. The crown "gimmick" of the G4 you might say, is the chromed out swivel neck that connects the dome to the monitor but honestly, I found it pretty fantastic. This thing has the most adjustability of any display I've ever used. You can turn it side to side at a pretty large degree, adjust the tilt and height, and the the action is just butter smooth. If you have setups in awkward places, the display can almost certainly move to suit your needs although the computer is already compact enough to not really need it which is why they might have eliminated the feature on the G5 and everything past that. That and having this kind of adjustability on the G5 would require dead weight in the base to balance out the added mass in the monitor. Speaking of weight, the G4 is a deceiving pig and the 20" inch weighs a a massive 40 pounds and carrying it by the neck is perfectly fine according to Apple. It's still a neat and well executed feature but the whole setup as whole just looks absolutely ahead of it's time and it still does today. Definitely one of my favorite looking pieces of hardware of all time, unfortunately with how it operates though it probably is better served as a display piece.

What is this?

Now for obvious reasons I won't compare the G4 to it's past competition because I'm sure nobody reading this is going to give a shit if this thing is still better than an office gray Gateway from 1998. I'm going to go into depth on how usable the G4 actually is with today's software and Internet just to find out if you still get away with using this pretty piece of tech. Now, problem number one: I have literally never used OS X and having used Windows for over a decade I'm pretty stubborn to learning a new OS. Luckily the basics of OS X weren't that difficult to figure out, especially when you figure out that the function of the menu bar at the top of the screen changes with whatever application is open. So I went ahead and screwed around with the computer's settings and then attempted to play a DVD; that's when I found out the disk drive was screwed up. So trying to use and disk based software was out of the equation until I fixed the drive. Not wanting to relegate the G4 to the realm of being a word processing machine just yet I hooked it up to Wi-Fi and fired up Safari.

This works at least...

Much to my surprise, Safari was damn near unusable, but bear in mind that this thing is running OS X 10.5 Leopard which is the last version of OS X to support PowerPC architecture. This observation slowly became a much bigger problem when I tried installing an old version of Chrome that was supported by 10.5 only to find it didn't work. The Chrome situation brought to light that because the G4 ran on PowerPC architecture it was virtually incompatible with almost every single Macintosh equivalent of software I was familiar with, even if it was an older, supposedly 10.5 compatible version. The reason why Chrome didn't work was because it was never designed to work on PPC, whereas on the newer Intel based Macs, it works fine and this is the case with many other programs. I installed a third party browser called Aurora which is basically a modified version of Firefox for PPC with newer features supported, and it improved my browsing experience only slightly; any site with detailed graphics or videos would still run like crap, and then Aurora broke for no reason not much later.

You're dead to all of us.

Apart from the rest of the dated guts inside of the G4, the PowerPC processor is pretty much the main reason why the G4 is just damn near useless. The truth is that the Internet, software, you name it no longer cares about a CPU architecture that was abandoned years ago; why still support it? Trying to use the PPC 7445 in today's computing world is like trying to race an air cooled VW Beetle against a Formula One car, it just does not work. I'm not even going to sugarcoat it; PowerPC processors are obsolete, useless pieces of shit. I have an old Pentium D machine from around 2005; it runs XP which is now largely unsupported by almost everyone but partly thanks to it's Intel CPU it can run newer versions of the same software the G4 can't. The difference is that I can at least get away with using the dusty old HP for a wider array of things today where I can't with the G4, either way if you're stuck with having to use either in this day and age you should probably invest in a new computer.

The iMac G4, like any old computer is pretty much obsolete in this day and age. While it's CPU sucks and won't allow me to do anything short of scroll through Wikipedia articles all day long, I still think it's one of the best looking and most functional desktop all-in-one computers ever produced, let alone just by Apple. If I could have a G4 with modern guts and a newer version of OS X, I would take it in a heartbeat, I like the design that much. I know more avid people have done things like gut Intel Mac Minis and put them inside the G4 but that's seems to be too daunting of a task for something I might not even keep. Like I said, it makes for a nice display piece and is probably better served that way, a testament to a different time; one where the PowerPC processor actually worked.

The iMac G4 is now discontinued.