The original blue-and-white 'Yosemite' Power Mac G3 was the first computer I bought brand new, after a number of years owning used computers. Popping down the side panel was a great party trick, and I ended up adding a Zip drive and upgrading the RAM and hard drive. Around the same time, my Dad bought a Sony camera with i.Link (FireWire), and I realized how easy it was to shoot and edit video on the G3... and the rest is history!
This machine right here is what started my journey into computer collecting. I picked mine up for free during my senior year of high school as the IT department was about to throw it out. I’ve upgraded it myself over the years with an ssd, better graphics and a USB 2.0 card, and I absolutely love the thing.
I unironically mained a B&W G3 until 2005, same as you minus the unknown back then ssd, maxed the ram at 1gb and even gave it one of those powerlogix 1.1ghz 750gx upgrades which made it scream [i think the faster G4 upgrades had some really weird and bad compromises like dropping the already slow 100mhz fsb to 66mhz]. However G3 was just done on OSX by the end of tiger, so i just used os9.2 i think, but that was too long in the tooth by the mid 2000s. Miss that machine.
@@anasevi9456 G4s had the same performance clock for clock as G3s in all but vector (AltiVec) instructions anyway! So a 1.1GHz G3 upgrade is very sensible :D
@@kaitlyn__L yeah they were wicked fast, the L2 was 1mb, which was a lot for the time, and better yet was on die full speed. Also had the 9200 Radeon 128mb, with double speed 66mhz pci. Ran games like UT2004 at higher settings fine, and oddly that cpu didn't bog down with bot numbers as fast as my x86 pc running at twice the mhz. While osx was fine for gaming and office work, more creative apps like Photoshop didnt like the lack of altivec, so most of my time was on PS6 on OS9.2 with my old Wacom Graphire. But like my Quad G5 it me being wary old software on an old OS that did it in for daily use. RIP.
I acquired one of these beauties last year and it’s been one of my favorite machines I own. I use it for writing mostly, but sometimes for games too. It’s really cool to find so many people out there who share an appreciation for this era of Apple computers and classic Mac OS.
@@toronado455 the PowerMac the beige G3 shared a case with had an identical one, and a few of its predecessors had like.. prototype versions of the same idea that weren’t done as well (eg needing to reach in and disconnect some cables before you fully pull the side down…) :)
There was an all-in-one from the early '90s where you could slide the motherboard right out the back of the case; everything it connected to was screwed into the chassis and connected with ports that faced backwards so it just unplugged from everything at once. Granted, this didn't make replacing the hard drive nearly as simple, but I guess you could upgrade the RAM or replace the battery at least.
personalization still does exist today just in a different form, you customize it during ordering... thats exactly what i did. unfortunately you customize it for the sake of how long you think you may own the computer in that case its best to maximize it.
I was so envious of the Blue-and-White G3 and how easy it was to open and access the internals! I had a Power Mac 8500 at the time, and getting into it was a chore. I nicked by knuckles more than a few times while working inside its cramped interior. The thing I miss most about the Macs from this era were how upgradeable they were. I upgraded the CPU, RAM, video card (3dfx Voodoo2, baby!), and hard drives in my 8500 so many times that it begged the philosophical question of Theseus' ship. At work a few years later, I had a Mirrored Drive Door (MDD) G4, which was the zenith of the B&W G3's form factor and also a joy to use.
No kidding. When was the last time Apple made a Mac with socketed CPU? I laugh every time I see my old 2008 MacBook, with its little latching door to access the battery and hard drive. Even my Framework still requires you to unscrew the bottom to get at those, and the battery isn't hot swappable. Shows how much computer design sucks now outside the desktop PC and enterprise space.
10:27 - For those who don't know, Bungie (the developer most known for Halo and Destiny), was originally a Mac game developer with the Marathon, Oni, and Myth games. Halo was originally going to be a Mac game, and the first time it was ever shown was by Steve Jobs at the Macworld 1999 expo. Microsoft bought them in 2000 to produce games for the Xbox. I ended up playing Marathon and Oni a number of years ago and didn't realize how much of Halo's lore was inspired by those games. The PowerPC G3 era to about maybe 2004 was a good time to be a Mac user. They were just so much faster than the PCs of the era and they got first-class driver support for GPUs and such.
No one nowadays fully can appreciate what a HUGE difference was the Blue G3 Macintosh over its beige predecessors. The fact that you could just open the case with a single hinge as opposed to the ridiculous origami needed to get inside those beige Macs was the most revolutionary thing about it. I spent the late 90s and early oughts with fingers covered in Band-Aids trying to upgrade the old 68000 Macs with more RAM, bigger HDs and accelerator cards. There were screws and bolts and tabs within tabs, there was a thin metal fascia inside the plastic covers that was as sharp as a Ginzu knife. I don't think that I ever managed to put a Beige Mac back together without having some leftover connectors or screws that never seemed to fit back where they were supposed to go.
Man I spent a ton of time on these machines in high school journalism and yearbook . MacOS 9, Adobe PageMaker, and Photoshop 5. Send stuff to the publishers on Zip disks. Usually had Napster running in the background taking advantage of the high school's T-1 connection and their lack of firewall on the 4 Mac devices that actually talked to a network. Fond memories.
Thank you for an excellent retrospective on this model, from the IDE issues to the build quality of the Studio CRTs, you hit the nail right on the head. You got some lovely shots of this system! Although my beige G3 MiniTower did the job, I always wanted one of these models when I was younger, they just looked so cool! I also remember reading that the ADB port was retained so older higher-end Apple CRT displays could still be used with those systems. As adjusting the settings of the monitor was done via ADB. The 15" LCD Studio Display manual also reminds you that plugging in the ADB port is essential to the computer fully utilizing the resolutions / settings of the display.
Hi Mac84, that's correct. And indeed, even the blueberry flat-panel Studio Display uses ADB, rather than USB as was used on the graphite flat-panel with the G4. I think Apple should've used USB for it, but perhaps it was easier to retain ADB from the earlier black/grey translucent flat-panel of 1998.
This is my favorite desktop of all time. I bought one in 2003 from eBay for ~$200 and it was my daily driver for a couple years. I ran OS 9 on it most of the time because OS X performance was pretty poor... Nothing but fond memories and I even liked the puck mouse.
I’ve never been as excited for an Apple product as I was for this. Genuinely changed the way I worked in graphic design, got me started in desktop video editing, and had an aesthetic that made me feel like I was in the future.
This was the start of the peak Apple era. Beautifully designed computers that really stood out from the crowd of bland white box PCs of the era. Not only were they easy to upgrade, Apple actually encouraged users to upgrade their systems with case designs like the G3/G4 towers. Imagine that! These days, Apple computers are notoriously difficult to open, RAM is impossible to upgrade, and even now with the Mac Studio, it's not possible to upgrade the storage drive yourself. Along with the latest versions of macOS being turned into iOS for desktops, Apple somehow went from making computers exciting again in the late 90s/ early 2000s back to being boring, disposable junk after a few years of use. What a tragedy.
@@agenericaccount3935 that’s part of the problem, really. They were chasing success and were forced to innovate and be user-friendly back then. Now they just have a captive audience of “ecosystem” customers, like Final Cut editors who can’t afford the lost project time to learn Premiere or others. So they sit on their laurels about user hostility and say “well hey, if you don’t like it you’re always welcome to buy a competitor’s :)” knowing people won’t. It’s gotten so bad that people were rejoicing over just getting ports and a workable keyboard back on the MBP.
A lot of it comes down to 1) a plateauing of storage and RAM demands over the past decade, meaning upgradeability isn't as important as it was in the early 2000's, and 2) large performance benefits of soldered/unified RAM for the M1 architecture. For 1), the average base storage across the Mac product line was ~6 GB in 2000, ~320 GB in 2010, and ~512 GB in 2020: apart from stuff like AAA games and 8K RAW footage, file sizes and storage demands haven't grown all that much in the past decade relative to the one before. For 2), the M1 Max has 8 channels of DDR5 memory, for a total bandwidth of 400 GB/s. In order to get that same performance with user-serviceable RAM, you'd need to find space for *8 separate DIMMs* inside the Mac Studio and new MBPs, while also taking away the advantage of large shared CPU/GPU memory. That performance/serviceability trade-off may not be worth it to *you*, and that's totally reasonable, but I think it's easily worth it for most of the user base. Hector Martin, the guy leading the team porting Linux to the M1, has written quite a bit on this if you're interested! (Disclaimer: I own both a B&W G3 tower and a 14" M1 Pro MBP and love them both)
I have good memories of that machine. It was what I bought at the start of my start of my design career. Never had complaints about the keyboard and mouse. A pleasure to own, it felt like a pro computer. Once I added a special video card, was doing video and After Effects projects on it professionally.
I loved these G3's - You used to be able to overclock them so easily it wasn't funny & they were a joy to work on. I created an imager using a hacked version of an unofficial Apple tool ( ASR, at least that's what it became ) to install hundreds at my job during a major upgrade effort & everyone raved about how much better they were than the previous PowerPC machines. Such a huge improvement in speed and expandability. And that Rage128 Pro video card was pretty decent for the time - it helped give a nice boost to Apple's gaming market at the time. There was alot of parallel development going on during Apple's resurgent early 2000s.
Xodium on TD has successfully swapped out the CMD ATA chip on his Rev1 B&W for the one used on the Rev2 - the new chip is 100% pin compatible, and available from UTSource. No other changes needed and solves all the problems.
Respect for Descent 3 at the end of the video. A unique forgotten game in which you need to navigate in all three dimensions, and not just left-right, forward-backward.
My grandad got one of these for his work in the mid 2000s (he's an engineer heavily into the vintage Macintosh workflow, since he's been with them since the 90s). After the power supply failed, he stashed it away and just continued to use the Studio Display 21 that he got with it. Now that's he's retired, I got them both and replaced the power supply in the G3 - now, they both work absolutely amazing. Even the display is working just fine with no issues.
Hey Colin, it's worth mentioning that your comments section on every video is the most fun and informative group I've seen on TH-cam. I've also seen a bit of a resurgence of this aesthetic, especially in the handheld gaming community. A lot of us were kids in the late 90's early 00's and I promise there was absolutely a jealousy factor involved when you had a basic looking console and your friend had something clear and colorful. Now that we're grown up, there's most definitely a market for this design choice.
I had a 400MHz G3, which was the machine that made me finally switch over to OS X. Previously I had stuck with Mac OS 9.2.2 on my iMac DV 400 but I finally made the switch with this machine. I picked it up 2nd hand from a lady who I used to know who worked for a charity in London. They were upgrading their machines to G4s after having the G3s for a few years and I got a great deal. I unfortunately though, had to get it home and I did via the train. I got a taxi from her office to the train station but then had to lug it to the platform and onto the train. I was thankful for the handles but it's still a heavy machine. The train was full so I used the G3 as a seat to sit on in the vestibule by the doors. When I got to the other end, I got a taxi to my house and set it up. She asked if I wanted a 21" Sony CRT monitor to go with it, so I did the same thing the next day. Carrying a 21" CRT onto a train and then off it again almost killed me! They were also getting rid of a few tray loading iMac's, and I managed to transport them home the same way as the G3 and monitor. I gave one of the iMac G3's to a friend which was her first computer. Her kids thought it was sooo cool! Another friend came over for the weekend and I decided I needed some more USB ports so bought a Belkin USB PCI card and installed it. He was amazed that when Jaguar loaded and the USB card just worked. No drivers needed. He sourced a used G4 soon after. I purchased a 32MB Radeon 7200(?) PCI graphics card from an old IRC acquaintance who at the time lived in Norway or Sweden. he sent me the card over and I installed that in lieu of the 16MB ATI Rage 128 that it came with. There was a hack to enable Quartz Extreme for none AGP graphics cards which made the Finder feel much smoother. I believe eventually I gave the G3 away along with several other machines in my collection as I had to downsize. Aside from the 12" MacBook - which is my favourite Apple computer ever, The B/W G3 holds a special place in my heart. Final word after playing with my 300MHz Beige G3 a bit recently and a little thing that most people won't really notice, but the fact you could open the door WITHOUT having to disconnect the power cable was a HUGE plus. It's a real pain in the ass with the beige G3s!!! Thanks for the video and memories!
It was about 1995-1996, I was using 7200 in school. In 1998, I was called up by my country to join the army and returned to society in 2000. My first job was in a graphic design company, and that was the first time I saw a B&W G3. There were many other Macs in the company, from the old white G3 to the 7200, 9600 and even the UMAX Mac, but none of them caught anyone's eye like the B&W G3. How I loved the apple of those days! The graphic design, the typeface and the imagery conveyed, the good old days.
I started a web design and video editing company with two of my students in August'99. We bought a Blue G3, and it was a fantastic machine. The only downside was that 3 weeks after we purchased it Apple introduced the G4, which according rumors at that point were at least a year out. Oh well, the G3 had plenty of juice to anything we wanted. We bought a G4 to go with it the next January, and the difference was amazing with the Altivec vector processing engine. Final Cut and Photoshop were blazing on both machines, but the G4 was another level of speed. Great days to be a Mac user after the almost death spiral 2 years before.
If I ever get a Funtastic N64, I want to track down a matching G3 to use as a monitor. With the exception of the Smoke N64, all of the colors can be coordinated (they’re actually REALLY close, to the point that it makes me wonder if one copied the other), and some of the Japanese Funtastics even had a similar two-tone scheme.
I have very fond memories of this machine. My dad worked for an Apple reseller for business and education and had one of these on long term loan for testing, so it sorta became our family Mac for a time until we got an iMac. I played a lot of Carmageddon, Dark Vengeance, and Myth II on it.
The iMac G3's aesthetics were so innovative, they won a highly coveted award at my house. Despite a firm "NO" regarding the placement of any of "your old computers" in the living area, a Bondi Blue iMac G3 sat on my dining room table for about two months after its recent acquisition, with zero commentary from the missus. Upon its eventual departure to the toybox, I informed she-who-shall-not-be-named that I had finally moved it on to its proper place. "Oh. Yeah, I know I said 'no computers in here' but it was so cute that I really didn't mind." High praise. High praise, indeed.
this aesthetic, even though we were always a windows family, is so nostalgic and beautiful for me man. There are tons of case features from this era that are incredible even by todays standards. Apple wasn't the only manufacturer making removable or swinging motherboard trays. I've actually made an matx open air case using a removable motherboard tray from an old pentium 2 system.
I remember being on slashdot back when this was all coming out and there was so much excitement over the IBM's 'PowerPC platform'. It was 100% commodity PC hardware right down to that socket A CPU socket BUT used a PowerPC and not an x86 chip. There was a lot of assumptions at the time that there would be more brands besides Apple shipping PowerPC compatible computers. There was even a rumored and later reveled version of Windows NT for PowerPC. This was at the height of the RISC vs CISC wars and x86 was seen as old and broken. Of course none of that took off, but for a brief moment people hoped for a viable alternative to x86. Much like today where people are hoping ARM desktop chips start to put pressure on x86.
that NT version for PowerPC was one of the proposed "new OS" solution to the aging classic macos; the other remarkable one was BeOS, that run super well on pre-G3 PowerMacs, like the venerable 8500
@@alerey4363 I used to love Be. It was amazing for its time. The guy who came to demo it at my school just pulled the power plug while he was presenting. He plugged it in turned it on and it came right back. That was mind-blowing in that era. A journaling file system? That was just crazy talk. I ran it on my 486 dx4 100 and it was an entirely different computer then if it ran Dos Windows 95 or even Linux at the time. I hate that it died.
IBM still ships POWER machines, and you’ll find some of them among the world’s most powerful supercomputers. All running Linux, of course. And there is a project to create an open-source version of BeOS, called Haiku. If you care about it, why not support it?
There probably was a version of NT that ran on ppc. Companies would often do that as an in house experiment. I know there was an in house version of the Mac OS that ran on x86 pcs without extra emu software. But it was in house only.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 haiku has no meaning now; in the early 2000s yes, but it's been 13 years in development, still in BETA and the only good thing about it is...the icons. Linux and Unix for the desktop pc has matured so much since BeOS that they overtook that multimedia everyday use from it; I love the BeOS icons, but for that I install xfce with BeOS theme and Be icons and I'm done with the nostalgia; haiku is not even good for testing purposes, it's a dead-end project without any real use today.
Possibly my favourite Apple tower case design of all time, even over the G5 and Quicksilver! Happy to see this one getting some much-needed clean-up and love! I saved one destined for my university department's e-waste a few years back and have it out on display in my office, it warms my heart every time I look at it. Extremely tempermental hardware-wise, though. I had to unseat and re-seat all the RAM over a dozen times each before it would boot stably with all 4 modules installed (each tested fine individually w/ Techtool). Also ejects the CD tray on boot every time for some reason, probably because it's a 3rd-party drive. Still a nice machine for Jaguar and OS 9 nostalgia!
I just picked one of these up and installed OS 9.2.2 and it works like new. I did learn a few things about this computer and thank you for making this great video.
After your most recent podcast episode, I came back to this video to give it a re-watch. The very best part on the second go-around was seeing that Descent 3 exists for Mac OS! I'll absolutely be installing that on my Blue and White G3 next time I get it out.
Oh man, you take me back! This was the second desktop computer I had ever owned, and I loved it! A media company was going to throw a bunch of them away, and I got to keep a few of them to make a better one for myself using their parts. I remember that I had 768 MB of RAM in mine, and that I had overclocked my 350 Mhz CPU to 450 Mhz, but then it was unstable during 3D renders, so I set it to 400 Mhz and that worked fine. I also had a Zip drive in mine, and I updated its DVD burner using the same model as used in the PowerMac G5 (Pioneer). Also had an 80 GB 7200 RPM hard drive. :)
For a brief moment I had some flashbacks about living with this machine, and what it was like to have something stand out so much in a room of PCs. We tried to get on the “Windows Refund Day” train with this one and got a refund for MacOS 8.5. It run mkLinux and Red Hat and had some fun challenges with bootloaders, but educational to overcome. It ran fast but within a couple of years the G4 arrived and made it feel slow. Those were RAPID days.
exact same thing happened to me. I was the art director in our office with an old dedicated graphics machine (non-Mac, non-PC) that had a ridiculous $4000 annual support contract. then one year they dropped the price of the contract but we already had that money budgeted, so I convinced my boss to let me buy an iMac with the surplus. Got it in 2000, flyback serviced in 04, and when they finally decided to upgrade everything to G5s in 06, I took the iMac home, cause an iMac with serviced flyback is GOLD
Good doc and overview. I was Mac support technician during this era and remember all of these features fondly. I'm sure there its a lot more to say about it but one thing worth mentioning is there was a company that made a rack mount drawer slide for this and the G4. You would remove the handles and to mount it on its side. We had several dozen mounted this way for Mac server farms.
I always loved the experimental era that Apple had between 1998 and 2004. Translucent computer cases and screens, bubbly industrial design. A fun era to play in.
This was and always will be, my favorite Mac. I have owned many, but never one which was so enjoyable to both use and maintain. I performed multiple upgrades of components over the years, and kept it running well into the MacOS X era. To this day it still boots up and runs fine. A beautiful and functional machine.
This is my all-time favourite Apple computer, for design language, flair and upgradability. The fact that you can upgrade it out with USB 2.0, graphics, fast SSDs and even processor upgrades is one thing - the fact that these upgrades could potentially let you watch this video in 480p/720p is even better.
I snagged one of those keyboards from my High School at the end of the year once and used it for many years. (Saved from the dumpster, not theft) One of my favorite membrane keyboards. Uniform keys, moved around to Dvorak. Nav cluster-less keyboard with tenkey remains my favorite form factor to this day.
I ended up with, I believe from goodwill, an eMac. It was basically an iMac but much cleaner looking in bright white with a flat screen CRT. It was a beautiful piece of art.
I used to build PCs for my own use in the 2000s. I don't know why mounting the motherboard to the minitower cover did not become a trend. That looks so much easier to work on instead of having to unplug all the cables from the back, then turning the minitower on its side, and then hunting around inside the case with its sides blocking out the ambient light.
These are so cool. I have a 450 model with a perfect condition matching LCD. It’s a change that the machine itself has some major cracking that I have epoxied back together in the hopes to prevent further issues.
I used that computer back in high school, it was mostly my teacher’s computer in the classroom, it was next to the blue iMac, but that computer was so fun especially with the 3D games on it!
These were highly coveted, but far out of price for my family as a kid when this dropped. Still makes me nostalgic for the styling of the near turn of the century
Such a beautiful machine and what a wonderfully refreshing change to the look of computers. Love the Faberge Guilloche like appearance of the ribbed blue, just gorgeous.
Apple was something different in the 90s and 2000s. I grew up with iMac G3s in my school classrooms and I believe that's what sparked my love for these old things.
I remember our high school having G4s in the computer animation class. When OS X came out they just had to upgrade. To date the only computers I've ever seen corrupt themselves just by upgrading the OS.
The moment you mentioned some criticizing the Powermac G4 for looking unprofessional, it made me realize how different of a time the 90s were; with the mindset back then of colorful things being deemed childlike, I could see why this was considered a big risk.
Despite being born a year or two after the G3 released, it's definetly one of my favorites. A lot of the key artwork from my favorite anime was created using the G3, Photoshop 5.0 and another art software known as MetaCreations Painter (which would eventually evolve into the modern day Corel Painter software) which was capable of emulating real-life painting much more than Photoshop, although in return it was incredibly heavy software, using up a ton of RAM and memory space for the time. While now it's considered light (to the point my laptop from 2016 can run it no problem) back then it was considered revolutionary software. It's fun to open and paint with every once in a while.
Im 24 going on 25, born the same year as this thing. They had the old translucent imacs at my elementary school when i was growing up but my moms mac was way newer by then (2007) . These old designs with the frutiger aero influences give me so much nostalgia, i almost wanna use one of these power mac’s as my next gaming PC case 😂
Saturday night nostalgia, I bought 16 of these built to the N'th with new 21" monitors, (not Apple, Mitsu black) they came In on an early Friday evening, my crew stayed OT to install them and I had the CPU installed on the desk to be seen... Great boxes back in the day
@10:25 OMG Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament!! :) This is actually a very cool looking machine. And indeed, the end of the nineties was an exciting time for the computer industry. We were still in the megahertz race, though that was changing. We used dial-up to connect to the internet, but it wasn't long before broadband came. Flash websites were a thing. And of course optical media.
I have one of those 17" displays. I got an entire LOT of stuff a few years ago (enough to fill up a 2015 4-runner with back seats down and front seat loaded) for FREE just by going to collect it! That monitor is nice. Like yours, I think the fly back transformer is going out on it though. It does the same thing yours does. Still, it's nice to have, and certainly repairable.
I bought one from a friend who's a graphics designer, he had fitted a Sonnet 450 MHz G4 daughter card and a high-end ATI Radeon graphics card to it. I found the G4 upgrade killed off the two FireWire 400 ports, so I fitted an expansion card with two FW 400 and two USB 2.0 ports plus another card with four more USB 2.0 ports. I also boosted the optic drive with a DVD Rewritable drive. It was so nice to work on with the drop-down access. I also boosted the RAM to its maximum of 1 GB. I had two 60 GB HDDs installed, one for Tiger and the other with OS 9.
The 90's were fantastic and exciting in so many different areas, toys, cartoons, music, video games, computers, movies and so much more. These transparent designs are trademark 90's and I miss it.
I still love the B&W G3 Mac's color and styling today. I never had one, but really pined for one back then. I did have a PM G4 in 2000 and loved that machine, but I wish it was colored like the B&W.
I have a G4 era 17” monitor and I spent 4 months hunting down a NOS flyback. Considering it does 1600x1200 at 60hz and mine still has solid convergence and purity, I feel it was worth the time spent.
As a freelance graphic designer throughout the 90's into the 20-teens I bought Macs not just because they were an industry standard but mostly they worked reliably, were easily upgraded and there service longevity was unmatched compared to other options available during those times. That came at a very steep price so replacing & upgrading a workstation was very much a calculated risk. My first brand new computer was an 8100/80 (competition to find one was fierce in the first month of the release) and that beast typically ran 14 hour hard days, 6 days a week. Had plenty of income to replace that warhorse in the late 90's but those G2's and beige G3's weren't that much of a performance advancement. RAM, CPU, network and video card upgrades to the 8100 offered far more bang for the buck than buying a new computer. Working with and on them was all pretty much the same anyway. The these things came about. Every comment and opine in this video is spot-on and it covers them all. When the blue & white G3's came out, I promptly jumped to buy one, the faster bus speed alone was convincing enough. That machine really changed the game (so to speak). A 350 MHz maxed out with 1G RAM and internal Zip drive was a considerable investment then, but the architecture of it was otherworldly. Didn't need to open the cover very often, unlike the 8100, but it felt like living the dream when I did. Migrating from the frustrations of SCSI peripherals to the ease and convenience of firewire was like loosing some very bad habits. Yeah, the keyboard sucked rotten eggs and that hockey puck mouse was bloody awful but, fortunately, they wore out fairly quickly and the ADB port allowed the use of my trusted and much loved extended keyboard/mouse combo. It was like reuniting with a pair of comfy old sneakers. The early model limitation of one internal hard drive was and still is really disappointing - especially since the power supply leads are right there - but at least a couple of hot swap external hard drives were available through the firewire ports and USB 1 ports offered some compensation. I don't think the optional SCSI card was ever used, that stuff was tasked to the old machine after all. Still think the blue & white G3 is the most aesthetically beautiful computer I've ever owned, and it has been the most trouble free Motorola processor Mac I've ever had. It work flawlessly to this day, even though it doesn't have much practacle use other than print spooling, scanning and other obsolete peripheral chores. Too bad table surface real estate is so very valuable, looking at it sure is easy on the eyes.
Last year I was able to score one for free that had the ZIP drive and a Sonnet G4 Encore PPC CPU in there. Sadly (or maybe luckily?) the previous owner took the hard drive out so I replaced it with a 80 gigabyte drive which I splitter into two partitions, one with OS9 and one with OS X 10.3. I’m however not sure (yet) what logic board revision I have but remembering I could use a drive on the IDE channel where the disc/ZIP is connected to I believe it would be the Rev2 board. TLDR; I love this PowerMac! It’s one of my absolute favorites!
I love the idea of handles on computers - especially workstations. From experience a fully loaded HP z620 is over 60 pounds so at some point handles become more of a necessity than just a feature.
The flyback transformer just needed to be replaced or if parts are unavailable, sealed with epoxy. I use to do those repair when i was fixing CRT TV and monitors with my uncle.
I bought this computer and monitor in 1999 I had the dvd drive, and no removable media. I had to set up an ftp server to access my files for school. I also had a tv tuner card installed in mine. It was great for gaming too I played Unreal Tournament on LAN
This was my first computer along with the 17in crt monitor. I long since upgraded and did away with it, only to get one again from one retired from my job and this month even added the blue lcd studio display to pair it with. Not for practical reasons, it’s 100% for nostalgic reasons. I’ll slowly upgrade it over time just as I have the rest of my collection.
Considering the love for Apple's old Alps keyboards, I'm sure that ADB port was frequently used for them. I quite prefer my Apple Keyboard with its clicky switches. It may not look as pretty as the matching USB keyboard, but the awful rubber domes quickly exhaust my hands.
I had the blue 17" blue CRT monitor, and Apple was aware of the problem with the flyback transformer. They had a program where they would ship you a box and you put your monitor in it and shipped it back to them. A little while later you got a monitor back--I don't remember if it was the same one or a different one, but I never had any other problems with it.
I have worked for 2 years on one of this G3 macs. In that time it was one of few computers cloud work on 512mb PSD file with 64mb of RAM without crashing or slowing down.
I have two of these in my garage. One was a DAW and has a G4 450 Sonnet cpu, a sample cell card and an Audiomedia3 card. It also has a scsi card and 73gb scsi hard drive and 1gb of ram. But they also made a G3 900 cpu for it I would have loved to have had. The other is stock. Great Macs back in their day.
I have one. This one has Mac OS 9.2.2 and it does run well. OS X 10.3 is installed and that’s pretty snappy too, though the user interface is not nearly as good as Tiger (10.4). If you find one and the monitor won’t work, try resetting the PRAM (opt+cmd+p+r on startup, repeat 3-4 times).
I still have my B&W G3. I've upgraded it to a 550mhz G4. Added hard drives and 256 mb of ram. Also replaced the graphics card with the original Radeon card.
This is my main vintage Mac solely because I love how it looks. Blue is my favorite color. I also have two matching Studio CRTs. It's been a great machine and I've upgraded the heck out of it.
I have a very tidy G3 B&W with the original keyboard and mouse, manuals and discs. Thanks to your video I didn't know about the motherboard revisions. Mine is the later one. I totally love the design of it, it's a great OS 9.2 machine and having the ADB was a great feature. The previous owner also put in a PCI serial port card.
While this wasn’t my first computer, it was the first computer that felt like a power house you could create with. I got mine in Spring 1999 and I’ve held onto it ever since, I love the thing. Sadly I disposed of the 17” Studio Display as it was such a hunking great beast of a monitor and I just didn’t have the space, but I do have the 15” LCD now if I ever want to power the thing up.
I do like the first iMac's radical appearance - but I do not agree that the other Macs before that were dull, beige boxes. That goes from the Windows and OS/2 PC at the time! No, the Mac stood out with a deliberate industrial design and off-white Platinum color. It made them (well most of them), look fresh. One of the things I _love_ about Apples is how they make tech look so good.
I don’t think Beige boxes look bad, they just didn’t stand out. It’s like when Tesla was new they turned heads but now everyone has one so they no longer do.
Fun fact: in Mach 1999 i seen in the MacWorld magazine the cover and an article regarding the new G3 PowerMac, and i new i wanted one and o wanted now. But i iam from Madeira Island in Portugal, and even though we had a small store that sold Apple stuff, will take months, and maybe a year to get this avaliable. So i done something crazy, went online, found a computer store in California and i called them, and i asked if they had the new G3 PowerMac, they said yes but i was in Europe so they couldn't do anything. So being amateur radio i new another amateur in California, so i wired the money to him via Western Union and i trusted him, i was nervous but fair enough a week later the DHL delivered the computer at home, a brand new 300Mhz G3 Blue & White at home, and what a machine, i still have it and it still works like the day i bought it. Only thing has a Rage 128 Pro graphic and G4 upgrade. Still ise it nowadays. I love this era of Macs. And yes mine come with the SCSI board.
The original blue-and-white 'Yosemite' Power Mac G3 was the first computer I bought brand new, after a number of years owning used computers.
Popping down the side panel was a great party trick, and I ended up adding a Zip drive and upgrading the RAM and hard drive. Around the same time, my Dad bought a Sony camera with i.Link (FireWire), and I realized how easy it was to shoot and edit video on the G3... and the rest is history!
rich people moment
I don't believe you. You were born with a Raspberry pi in your pudgy little baby fist and I won't believe anything else.
Funny enough my original PS2 had a mini FireWire port.
The serviceability of these old Macs is the thing I miss the most from Apple.
@@JohnAndersenYVIG agreed, think they should bring these designs back with their current colors???
This machine right here is what started my journey into computer collecting. I picked mine up for free during my senior year of high school as the IT department was about to throw it out. I’ve upgraded it myself over the years with an ssd, better graphics and a USB 2.0 card, and I absolutely love the thing.
Nice!
I unironically mained a B&W G3 until 2005, same as you minus the unknown back then ssd, maxed the ram at 1gb and even gave it one of those powerlogix 1.1ghz 750gx upgrades which made it scream [i think the faster G4 upgrades had some really weird and bad compromises like dropping the already slow 100mhz fsb to 66mhz].
However G3 was just done on OSX by the end of tiger, so i just used os9.2 i think, but that was too long in the tooth by the mid 2000s. Miss that machine.
@@anasevi9456 G4s had the same performance clock for clock as G3s in all but vector (AltiVec) instructions anyway! So a 1.1GHz G3 upgrade is very sensible :D
@@kaitlyn__L yeah they were wicked fast, the L2 was 1mb, which was a lot for the time, and better yet was on die full speed. Also had the 9200 Radeon 128mb, with double speed 66mhz pci. Ran games like UT2004 at higher settings fine, and oddly that cpu didn't bog down with bot numbers as fast as my x86 pc running at twice the mhz. While osx was fine for gaming and office work, more creative apps like Photoshop didnt like the lack of altivec, so most of my time was on PS6 on OS9.2 with my old Wacom Graphire.
But like my Quad G5 it me being wary old software on an old OS that did it in for daily use. RIP.
Same here, I got it for $20 with no RAM or HDD, but I was able to find them and it works like a charm!
I acquired one of these beauties last year and it’s been one of my favorite machines I own. I use it for writing mostly, but sometimes for games too. It’s really cool to find so many people out there who share an appreciation for this era of Apple computers and classic Mac OS.
The way the motherboard folds down is so simple and elegant, and so good for repairability. It's a shame how Apple has become with this.
yes, but that feature actually started with the beige G3!
@@toronado455 it was present in some of the earlier non-G3 PowerMacs too
@@kaitlyn__L ok thanks for this correction. I remembered it on beige G3, but I didn't know it started earlier.
@@toronado455 the PowerMac the beige G3 shared a case with had an identical one, and a few of its predecessors had like.. prototype versions of the same idea that weren’t done as well (eg needing to reach in and disconnect some cables before you fully pull the side down…) :)
There was an all-in-one from the early '90s where you could slide the motherboard right out the back of the case; everything it connected to was screwed into the chassis and connected with ports that faced backwards so it just unplugged from everything at once.
Granted, this didn't make replacing the hard drive nearly as simple, but I guess you could upgrade the RAM or replace the battery at least.
I wish we could get computers that give us the same feeling as this did... Personalization was so different back then.
I was a year old baby in May of 1998... am 25 today
personalization still does exist today just in a different form, you customize it during ordering... thats exactly what i did. unfortunately you customize it for the sake of how long you think you may own the computer in that case its best to maximize it.
i dont miss the days of usb2 external hdds and clicking zip drives and dialup. things are so much better now tbh.
@@ldfjlasthis tbh. All the wining about modern computing is appaling, todays stuff is so much better. Nostalgia is surely the crack of old people...
I was so envious of the Blue-and-White G3 and how easy it was to open and access the internals! I had a Power Mac 8500 at the time, and getting into it was a chore. I nicked by knuckles more than a few times while working inside its cramped interior. The thing I miss most about the Macs from this era were how upgradeable they were. I upgraded the CPU, RAM, video card (3dfx Voodoo2, baby!), and hard drives in my 8500 so many times that it begged the philosophical question of Theseus' ship. At work a few years later, I had a Mirrored Drive Door (MDD) G4, which was the zenith of the B&W G3's form factor and also a joy to use.
No kidding. When was the last time Apple made a Mac with socketed CPU? I laugh every time I see my old 2008 MacBook, with its little latching door to access the battery and hard drive. Even my Framework still requires you to unscrew the bottom to get at those, and the battery isn't hot swappable. Shows how much computer design sucks now outside the desktop PC and enterprise space.
10:27 - For those who don't know, Bungie (the developer most known for Halo and Destiny), was originally a Mac game developer with the Marathon, Oni, and Myth games. Halo was originally going to be a Mac game, and the first time it was ever shown was by Steve Jobs at the Macworld 1999 expo. Microsoft bought them in 2000 to produce games for the Xbox. I ended up playing Marathon and Oni a number of years ago and didn't realize how much of Halo's lore was inspired by those games. The PowerPC G3 era to about maybe 2004 was a good time to be a Mac user. They were just so much faster than the PCs of the era and they got first-class driver support for GPUs and such.
No one nowadays fully can appreciate what a HUGE difference was the Blue G3 Macintosh over its beige predecessors. The fact that you could just open the case with a single hinge as opposed to the ridiculous origami needed to get inside those beige Macs was the most revolutionary thing about it. I spent the late 90s and early oughts with fingers covered in Band-Aids trying to upgrade the old 68000 Macs with more RAM, bigger HDs and accelerator cards. There were screws and bolts and tabs within tabs, there was a thin metal fascia inside the plastic covers that was as sharp as a Ginzu knife. I don't think that I ever managed to put a Beige Mac back together without having some leftover connectors or screws that never seemed to fit back where they were supposed to go.
Man I spent a ton of time on these machines in high school journalism and yearbook . MacOS 9, Adobe PageMaker, and Photoshop 5. Send stuff to the publishers on Zip disks. Usually had Napster running in the background taking advantage of the high school's T-1 connection and their lack of firewall on the 4 Mac devices that actually talked to a network. Fond memories.
Thank you for an excellent retrospective on this model, from the IDE issues to the build quality of the Studio CRTs, you hit the nail right on the head. You got some lovely shots of this system!
Although my beige G3 MiniTower did the job, I always wanted one of these models when I was younger, they just looked so cool!
I also remember reading that the ADB port was retained so older higher-end Apple CRT displays could still be used with those systems. As adjusting the settings of the monitor was done via ADB. The 15" LCD Studio Display manual also reminds you that plugging in the ADB port is essential to the computer fully utilizing the resolutions / settings of the display.
Hi Mac84, that's correct. And indeed, even the blueberry flat-panel Studio Display uses ADB, rather than USB as was used on the graphite flat-panel with the G4. I think Apple should've used USB for it, but perhaps it was easier to retain ADB from the earlier black/grey translucent flat-panel of 1998.
This is my favorite desktop of all time. I bought one in 2003 from eBay for ~$200 and it was my daily driver for a couple years. I ran OS 9 on it most of the time because OS X performance was pretty poor... Nothing but fond memories and I even liked the puck mouse.
Hell yeah, I kept using mine from 2003 all the way to 2007, with Mac OS X 10.3 I believe. Such a cool machine!
The fact even the beige G3’s could run OS X is really really awesome! :)
I’ve never been as excited for an Apple product as I was for this. Genuinely changed the way I worked in graphic design, got me started in desktop video editing, and had an aesthetic that made me feel like I was in the future.
I really miss the translucent or transparent plastic aesthetics. Would love to see that making a comeback.
This was the start of the peak Apple era. Beautifully designed computers that really stood out from the crowd of bland white box PCs of the era. Not only were they easy to upgrade, Apple actually encouraged users to upgrade their systems with case designs like the G3/G4 towers. Imagine that!
These days, Apple computers are notoriously difficult to open, RAM is impossible to upgrade, and even now with the Mac Studio, it's not possible to upgrade the storage drive yourself. Along with the latest versions of macOS being turned into iOS for desktops, Apple somehow went from making computers exciting again in the late 90s/ early 2000s back to being boring, disposable junk after a few years of use. What a tragedy.
It seems to have worked out for them in the end. World’s highest market cap, or nearly so. ¯\_()_/¯
Lack of upgradability hasn’t hurt them a lick.
@@agenericaccount3935 Apple has become a fashion accessory
@@agenericaccount3935 that’s part of the problem, really.
They were chasing success and were forced to innovate and be user-friendly back then.
Now they just have a captive audience of “ecosystem” customers, like Final Cut editors who can’t afford the lost project time to learn Premiere or others.
So they sit on their laurels about user hostility and say “well hey, if you don’t like it you’re always welcome to buy a competitor’s :)” knowing people won’t.
It’s gotten so bad that people were rejoicing over just getting ports and a workable keyboard back on the MBP.
I don’t know why a company’s ability to take money off its users can somehow be considered a selling point for its products ...
A lot of it comes down to 1) a plateauing of storage and RAM demands over the past decade, meaning upgradeability isn't as important as it was in the early 2000's, and 2) large performance benefits of soldered/unified RAM for the M1 architecture.
For 1), the average base storage across the Mac product line was ~6 GB in 2000, ~320 GB in 2010, and ~512 GB in 2020: apart from stuff like AAA games and 8K RAW footage, file sizes and storage demands haven't grown all that much in the past decade relative to the one before. For 2), the M1 Max has 8 channels of DDR5 memory, for a total bandwidth of 400 GB/s. In order to get that same performance with user-serviceable RAM, you'd need to find space for *8 separate DIMMs* inside the Mac Studio and new MBPs, while also taking away the advantage of large shared CPU/GPU memory. That performance/serviceability trade-off may not be worth it to *you*, and that's totally reasonable, but I think it's easily worth it for most of the user base. Hector Martin, the guy leading the team porting Linux to the M1, has written quite a bit on this if you're interested!
(Disclaimer: I own both a B&W G3 tower and a 14" M1 Pro MBP and love them both)
This machine was my dream Mac. I had a Blue Rev.D 333mhz iMac, but this is the one I wanted. Still to this day i find it beautiful.
I have good memories of that machine. It was what I bought at the start of my start of my design career. Never had complaints about the keyboard and mouse. A pleasure to own, it felt like a pro computer. Once I added a special video card, was doing video and After Effects projects on it professionally.
I loved these G3's - You used to be able to overclock them so easily it wasn't funny & they were a joy to work on. I created an imager using a hacked version of an unofficial Apple tool ( ASR, at least that's what it became ) to install hundreds at my job during a major upgrade effort & everyone raved about how much better they were than the previous PowerPC machines. Such a huge improvement in speed and expandability. And that Rage128 Pro video card was pretty decent for the time - it helped give a nice boost to Apple's gaming market at the time. There was alot of parallel development going on during Apple's resurgent early 2000s.
Xodium on TD has successfully swapped out the CMD ATA chip on his Rev1 B&W for the one used on the Rev2 - the new chip is 100% pin compatible, and available from UTSource. No other changes needed and solves all the problems.
Do you have a link or search term I can use? Trying to find this thread but coming up blank.
Respect for Descent 3 at the end of the video. A unique forgotten game in which you need to navigate in all three dimensions, and not just left-right, forward-backward.
My grandad got one of these for his work in the mid 2000s (he's an engineer heavily into the vintage Macintosh workflow, since he's been with them since the 90s). After the power supply failed, he stashed it away and just continued to use the Studio Display 21 that he got with it. Now that's he's retired, I got them both and replaced the power supply in the G3 - now, they both work absolutely amazing. Even the display is working just fine with no issues.
Hey Colin, it's worth mentioning that your comments section on every video is the most fun and informative group I've seen on TH-cam. I've also seen a bit of a resurgence of this aesthetic, especially in the handheld gaming community. A lot of us were kids in the late 90's early 00's and I promise there was absolutely a jealousy factor involved when you had a basic looking console and your friend had something clear and colorful. Now that we're grown up, there's most definitely a market for this design choice.
I had a 400MHz G3, which was the machine that made me finally switch over to OS X. Previously I had stuck with Mac OS 9.2.2 on my iMac DV 400 but I finally made the switch with this machine. I picked it up 2nd hand from a lady who I used to know who worked for a charity in London. They were upgrading their machines to G4s after having the G3s for a few years and I got a great deal. I unfortunately though, had to get it home and I did via the train. I got a taxi from her office to the train station but then had to lug it to the platform and onto the train. I was thankful for the handles but it's still a heavy machine. The train was full so I used the G3 as a seat to sit on in the vestibule by the doors. When I got to the other end, I got a taxi to my house and set it up. She asked if I wanted a 21" Sony CRT monitor to go with it, so I did the same thing the next day. Carrying a 21" CRT onto a train and then off it again almost killed me! They were also getting rid of a few tray loading iMac's, and I managed to transport them home the same way as the G3 and monitor. I gave one of the iMac G3's to a friend which was her first computer. Her kids thought it was sooo cool!
Another friend came over for the weekend and I decided I needed some more USB ports so bought a Belkin USB PCI card and installed it. He was amazed that when Jaguar loaded and the USB card just worked. No drivers needed. He sourced a used G4 soon after.
I purchased a 32MB Radeon 7200(?) PCI graphics card from an old IRC acquaintance who at the time lived in Norway or Sweden. he sent me the card over and I installed that in lieu of the 16MB ATI Rage 128 that it came with. There was a hack to enable Quartz Extreme for none AGP graphics cards which made the Finder feel much smoother. I believe eventually I gave the G3 away along with several other machines in my collection as I had to downsize. Aside from the 12" MacBook - which is my favourite Apple computer ever, The B/W G3 holds a special place in my heart.
Final word after playing with my 300MHz Beige G3 a bit recently and a little thing that most people won't really notice, but the fact you could open the door WITHOUT having to disconnect the power cable was a HUGE plus. It's a real pain in the ass with the beige G3s!!!
Thanks for the video and memories!
It was about 1995-1996, I was using 7200 in school. In 1998, I was called up by my country to join the army and returned to society in 2000. My first job was in a graphic design company, and that was the first time I saw a B&W G3. There were many other Macs in the company, from the old white G3 to the 7200, 9600 and even the UMAX Mac, but none of them caught anyone's eye like the B&W G3.
How I loved the apple of those days! The graphic design, the typeface and the imagery conveyed, the good old days.
I started a web design and video editing company with two of my students in August'99. We bought a Blue G3, and it was a fantastic machine. The only downside was that 3 weeks after we purchased it Apple introduced the G4, which according rumors at that point were at least a year out. Oh well, the G3 had plenty of juice to anything we wanted. We bought a G4 to go with it the next January, and the difference was amazing with the Altivec vector processing engine. Final Cut and Photoshop were blazing on both machines, but the G4 was another level of speed. Great days to be a Mac user after the almost death spiral 2 years before.
If I ever get a Funtastic N64, I want to track down a matching G3 to use as a monitor. With the exception of the Smoke N64, all of the colors can be coordinated (they’re actually REALLY close, to the point that it makes me wonder if one copied the other), and some of the Japanese Funtastics even had a similar two-tone scheme.
I have very fond memories of this machine. My dad worked for an Apple reseller for business and education and had one of these on long term loan for testing, so it sorta became our family Mac for a time until we got an iMac. I played a lot of Carmageddon, Dark Vengeance, and Myth II on it.
The iMac G3's aesthetics were so innovative, they won a highly coveted award at my house. Despite a firm "NO" regarding the placement of any of "your old computers" in the living area, a Bondi Blue iMac G3 sat on my dining room table for about two months after its recent acquisition, with zero commentary from the missus.
Upon its eventual departure to the toybox, I informed she-who-shall-not-be-named that I had finally moved it on to its proper place. "Oh. Yeah, I know I said 'no computers in here' but it was so cute that I really didn't mind."
High praise. High praise, indeed.
this aesthetic, even though we were always a windows family, is so nostalgic and beautiful for me man. There are tons of case features from this era that are incredible even by todays standards. Apple wasn't the only manufacturer making removable or swinging motherboard trays. I've actually made an matx open air case using a removable motherboard tray from an old pentium 2 system.
I remember being on slashdot back when this was all coming out and there was so much excitement over the IBM's 'PowerPC platform'. It was 100% commodity PC hardware right down to that socket A CPU socket BUT used a PowerPC and not an x86 chip. There was a lot of assumptions at the time that there would be more brands besides Apple shipping PowerPC compatible computers. There was even a rumored and later reveled version of Windows NT for PowerPC. This was at the height of the RISC vs CISC wars and x86 was seen as old and broken. Of course none of that took off, but for a brief moment people hoped for a viable alternative to x86. Much like today where people are hoping ARM desktop chips start to put pressure on x86.
that NT version for PowerPC was one of the proposed "new OS" solution to the aging classic macos; the other remarkable one was BeOS, that run super well on pre-G3 PowerMacs, like the venerable 8500
@@alerey4363 I used to love Be. It was amazing for its time. The guy who came to demo it at my school just pulled the power plug while he was presenting. He plugged it in turned it on and it came right back. That was mind-blowing in that era. A journaling file system? That was just crazy talk. I ran it on my 486 dx4 100 and it was an entirely different computer then if it ran Dos Windows 95 or even Linux at the time. I hate that it died.
IBM still ships POWER machines, and you’ll find some of them among the world’s most powerful supercomputers. All running Linux, of course.
And there is a project to create an open-source version of BeOS, called Haiku. If you care about it, why not support it?
There probably was a version of NT that ran on ppc. Companies would often do that as an in house experiment. I know there was an in house version of the Mac OS that ran on x86 pcs without extra emu software. But it was in house only.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 haiku has no meaning now; in the early 2000s yes, but it's been 13 years in development, still in BETA and the only good thing about it is...the icons.
Linux and Unix for the desktop pc has matured so much since BeOS that they overtook that multimedia everyday use from it; I love the BeOS icons, but for that I install xfce with BeOS theme and Be icons and I'm done with the nostalgia; haiku is not even good for testing purposes, it's a dead-end project without any real use today.
Possibly my favourite Apple tower case design of all time, even over the G5 and Quicksilver! Happy to see this one getting some much-needed clean-up and love! I saved one destined for my university department's e-waste a few years back and have it out on display in my office, it warms my heart every time I look at it.
Extremely tempermental hardware-wise, though. I had to unseat and re-seat all the RAM over a dozen times each before it would boot stably with all 4 modules installed (each tested fine individually w/ Techtool). Also ejects the CD tray on boot every time for some reason, probably because it's a 3rd-party drive. Still a nice machine for Jaguar and OS 9 nostalgia!
I just picked one of these up and installed OS 9.2.2 and it works like new. I did learn a few things about this computer and thank you for making this great video.
After your most recent podcast episode, I came back to this video to give it a re-watch. The very best part on the second go-around was seeing that Descent 3 exists for Mac OS! I'll absolutely be installing that on my Blue and White G3 next time I get it out.
Oh man, you take me back! This was the second desktop computer I had ever owned, and I loved it! A media company was going to throw a bunch of them away, and I got to keep a few of them to make a better one for myself using their parts. I remember that I had 768 MB of RAM in mine, and that I had overclocked my 350 Mhz CPU to 450 Mhz, but then it was unstable during 3D renders, so I set it to 400 Mhz and that worked fine. I also had a Zip drive in mine, and I updated its DVD burner using the same model as used in the PowerMac G5 (Pioneer). Also had an 80 GB 7200 RPM hard drive. :)
For a brief moment I had some flashbacks about living with this machine, and what it was like to have something stand out so much in a room of PCs. We tried to get on the “Windows Refund Day” train with this one and got a refund for MacOS 8.5. It run mkLinux and Red Hat and had some fun challenges with bootloaders, but educational to overcome. It ran fast but within a couple of years the G4 arrived and made it feel slow. Those were RAPID days.
This case was soo ahead of its time. I had a gaming pc with this exact case.
The early Bondi Blue iMac G3s also had flyback transformer problems. Got mine on early 1999, had to have it serviced by 2003. Still works!
exact same thing happened to me. I was the art director in our office with an old dedicated graphics machine (non-Mac, non-PC) that had a ridiculous $4000 annual support contract. then one year they dropped the price of the contract but we already had that money budgeted, so I convinced my boss to let me buy an iMac with the surplus. Got it in 2000, flyback serviced in 04, and when they finally decided to upgrade everything to G5s in 06, I took the iMac home, cause an iMac with serviced flyback is GOLD
Good doc and overview. I was Mac support technician during this era and remember all of these features fondly. I'm sure there its a lot more to say about it but one thing worth mentioning is there was a company that made a rack mount drawer slide for this and the G4. You would remove the handles and to mount it on its side. We had several dozen mounted this way for Mac server farms.
I always loved the experimental era that Apple had between 1998 and 2004. Translucent computer cases and screens, bubbly industrial design. A fun era to play in.
This was and always will be, my favorite Mac. I have owned many, but never one which was so enjoyable to both use and maintain. I performed multiple upgrades of components over the years, and kept it running well into the MacOS X era. To this day it still boots up and runs fine. A beautiful and functional machine.
your videos are just another level, i love them all
This is my all-time favourite Apple computer, for design language, flair and upgradability. The fact that you can upgrade it out with USB 2.0, graphics, fast SSDs and even processor upgrades is one thing - the fact that these upgrades could potentially let you watch this video in 480p/720p is even better.
I snagged one of those keyboards from my High School at the end of the year once and used it for many years. (Saved from the dumpster, not theft)
One of my favorite membrane keyboards. Uniform keys, moved around to Dvorak.
Nav cluster-less keyboard with tenkey remains my favorite form factor to this day.
I ended up with, I believe from goodwill, an eMac. It was basically an iMac but much cleaner looking in bright white with a flat screen CRT. It was a beautiful piece of art.
I used to build PCs for my own use in the 2000s. I don't know why mounting the motherboard to the minitower cover did not become a trend. That looks so much easier to work on instead of having to unplug all the cables from the back, then turning the minitower on its side, and then hunting around inside the case with its sides blocking out the ambient light.
Man, your intro is unskippable, I just love it!
These are so cool. I have a 450 model with a perfect condition matching LCD. It’s a change that the machine itself has some major cracking that I have epoxied back together in the hopes to prevent further issues.
So gorgeous. I still have my Orange iBook, all the Macs of that era were excellent.
It's hard to think we can get much further in computer functionality. Everything is so easily accessible now.
I used that computer back in high school, it was mostly my teacher’s computer in the classroom, it was next to the blue iMac, but that computer was so fun especially with the 3D games on it!
This blue G3 Powermac brought my attention to Apple back then, in the end i got a later grey G4 which was also nice.
These were highly coveted, but far out of price for my family as a kid when this dropped. Still makes me nostalgic for the styling of the near turn of the century
Such a beautiful machine and what a wonderfully refreshing change to the look of computers. Love the Faberge Guilloche like appearance of the ribbed blue, just gorgeous.
Apple was something different in the 90s and 2000s. I grew up with iMac G3s in my school classrooms and I believe that's what sparked my love for these old things.
I’m blown away at these videos. You are doing the world an educational service and we can’t thank you enough. Have an awesome day.
Miss that era! So much nostalgia from these machines
I remember our high school having G4s in the computer animation class. When OS X came out they just had to upgrade.
To date the only computers I've ever seen corrupt themselves just by upgrading the OS.
The moment you mentioned some criticizing the Powermac G4 for looking unprofessional, it made me realize how different of a time the 90s were; with the mindset back then of colorful things being deemed childlike, I could see why this was considered a big risk.
Man, your videos are so relaxing…
Despite being born a year or two after the G3 released, it's definetly one of my favorites. A lot of the key artwork from my favorite anime was created using the G3, Photoshop 5.0 and another art software known as MetaCreations Painter (which would eventually evolve into the modern day Corel Painter software) which was capable of emulating real-life painting much more than Photoshop, although in return it was incredibly heavy software, using up a ton of RAM and memory space for the time. While now it's considered light (to the point my laptop from 2016 can run it no problem) back then it was considered revolutionary software. It's fun to open and paint with every once in a while.
Truly miss when proper design was meant to be "absurd". Nowadays even Mcdonalds restaurants are gray and bleak.
Im 24 going on 25, born the same year as this thing. They had the old translucent imacs at my elementary school when i was growing up but my moms mac was way newer by then (2007) . These old designs with the frutiger aero influences give me so much nostalgia, i almost wanna use one of these power mac’s as my next gaming PC case 😂
Saturday night nostalgia, I bought 16 of these built to the N'th with new 21" monitors, (not Apple, Mitsu black) they came In on an early Friday evening, my crew stayed OT to install them and I had the CPU installed on the desk to be seen... Great boxes back in the day
I always enjoy your videos!! Thank you!
@10:25 OMG Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament!! :)
This is actually a very cool looking machine. And indeed, the end of the nineties was an exciting time for the computer industry. We were still in the megahertz race, though that was changing. We used dial-up to connect to the internet, but it wasn't long before broadband came. Flash websites were a thing. And of course optical media.
I have one of those 17" displays. I got an entire LOT of stuff a few years ago (enough to fill up a 2015 4-runner with back seats down and front seat loaded) for FREE just by going to collect it! That monitor is nice. Like yours, I think the fly back transformer is going out on it though. It does the same thing yours does. Still, it's nice to have, and certainly repairable.
I bought one from a friend who's a graphics designer, he had fitted a Sonnet 450 MHz G4 daughter card and a high-end ATI Radeon graphics card to it. I found the G4 upgrade killed off the two FireWire 400 ports, so I fitted an expansion card with two FW 400 and two USB 2.0 ports plus another card with four more USB 2.0 ports. I also boosted the optic drive with a DVD Rewritable drive. It was so nice to work on with the drop-down access. I also boosted the RAM to its maximum of 1 GB. I had two 60 GB HDDs installed, one for Tiger and the other with OS 9.
I had a G4 for many years around 2015. Believe it or not it was a very capable machine with so many easy upgrades
The 90's were fantastic and exciting in so many different areas, toys, cartoons, music, video games, computers, movies and so much more.
These transparent designs are trademark 90's and I miss it.
I still love the B&W G3 Mac's color and styling today. I never had one, but really pined for one back then. I did have a PM G4 in 2000 and loved that machine, but I wish it was colored like the B&W.
I have a G4 era 17” monitor and I spent 4 months hunting down a NOS flyback. Considering it does 1600x1200 at 60hz and mine still has solid convergence and purity, I feel it was worth the time spent.
As a freelance graphic designer throughout the 90's into the 20-teens I bought Macs not just because they were an industry standard but mostly they worked reliably, were easily upgraded and there service longevity was unmatched compared to other options available during those times. That came at a very steep price so replacing & upgrading a workstation was very much a calculated risk. My first brand new computer was an 8100/80 (competition to find one was fierce in the first month of the release) and that beast typically ran 14 hour hard days, 6 days a week.
Had plenty of income to replace that warhorse in the late 90's but those G2's and beige G3's weren't that much of a performance advancement. RAM, CPU, network and video card upgrades to the 8100 offered far more bang for the buck than buying a new computer. Working with and on them was all pretty much the same anyway.
The these things came about. Every comment and opine in this video is spot-on and it covers them all.
When the blue & white G3's came out, I promptly jumped to buy one, the faster bus speed alone was convincing enough. That machine really changed the game (so to speak). A 350 MHz maxed out with 1G RAM and internal Zip drive was a considerable investment then, but the architecture of it was otherworldly. Didn't need to open the cover very often, unlike the 8100, but it felt like living the dream when I did. Migrating from the frustrations of SCSI peripherals to the ease and convenience of firewire was like loosing some very bad habits.
Yeah, the keyboard sucked rotten eggs and that hockey puck mouse was bloody awful but, fortunately, they wore out fairly quickly and the ADB port allowed the use of my trusted and much loved extended keyboard/mouse combo. It was like reuniting with a pair of comfy old sneakers. The early model limitation of one internal hard drive was and still is really disappointing - especially since the power supply leads are right there - but at least a couple of hot swap external hard drives were available through the firewire ports and USB 1 ports offered some compensation. I don't think the optional SCSI card was ever used, that stuff was tasked to the old machine after all.
Still think the blue & white G3 is the most aesthetically beautiful computer I've ever owned, and it has been the most trouble free Motorola processor Mac I've ever had. It work flawlessly to this day, even though it doesn't have much practacle use other than print spooling, scanning and other obsolete peripheral chores. Too bad table surface real estate is so very valuable, looking at it sure is easy on the eyes.
I still have my 466 G3 clamshell that I bought brand new from Circuit City. I love this generation of Apple computers.
I still have mine sitting on a desk upstairs with it's 21" behemoth of a monitor. Had it for 17 years now.
Last year I was able to score one for free that had the ZIP drive and a Sonnet G4 Encore PPC CPU in there. Sadly (or maybe luckily?) the previous owner took the hard drive out so I replaced it with a 80 gigabyte drive which I splitter into two partitions, one with OS9 and one with OS X 10.3.
I’m however not sure (yet) what logic board revision I have but remembering I could use a drive on the IDE channel where the disc/ZIP is connected to I believe it would be the Rev2 board.
TLDR; I love this PowerMac! It’s one of my absolute favorites!
I love the idea of handles on computers - especially workstations. From experience a fully loaded HP z620 is over 60 pounds so at some point handles become more of a necessity than just a feature.
To own a Mac back in those days was truly something special and awesome!
The flyback transformer just needed to be replaced or if parts are unavailable, sealed with epoxy. I use to do those repair when i was fixing CRT TV and monitors with my uncle.
I serviced many of these units when I worked for the public schools here as a hardware tech...We actually became an Apple self-servicing center.
I bought this computer and monitor in 1999 I had the dvd drive, and no removable media. I had to set up an ftp server to access my files for school. I also had a tv tuner card installed in mine. It was great for gaming too I played Unreal Tournament on LAN
This was my first computer along with the 17in crt monitor. I long since upgraded and did away with it, only to get one again from one retired from my job and this month even added the blue lcd studio display to pair it with. Not for practical reasons, it’s 100% for nostalgic reasons. I’ll slowly upgrade it over time just as I have the rest of my collection.
Considering the love for Apple's old Alps keyboards, I'm sure that ADB port was frequently used for them. I quite prefer my Apple Keyboard with its clicky switches. It may not look as pretty as the matching USB keyboard, but the awful rubber domes quickly exhaust my hands.
I had the blue 17" blue CRT monitor, and Apple was aware of the problem with the flyback transformer. They had a program where they would ship you a box and you put your monitor in it and shipped it back to them. A little while later you got a monitor back--I don't remember if it was the same one or a different one, but I never had any other problems with it.
Loved using these things for Video Production class back in 2000
I have worked for 2 years on one of this G3 macs. In that time it was one of few computers cloud work on 512mb PSD file with 64mb of RAM without crashing or slowing down.
The Snow White design language was not boring, nor was it beige.
I love and respect both design, but if I had the option I’d go with a beige myself as to me it just has a more mature vibe
That first iMac saved Apple. Also the G3 series had amazing case design, so easy to work on it.
I have two of these in my garage. One was a DAW and has a G4 450 Sonnet cpu, a sample cell card and an Audiomedia3 card. It also has a scsi card and 73gb scsi hard drive and 1gb of ram. But they also made a G3 900 cpu for it I would have loved to have had. The other is stock. Great Macs back in their day.
I have one. This one has Mac OS 9.2.2 and it does run well. OS X 10.3 is installed and that’s pretty snappy too, though the user interface is not nearly as good as Tiger (10.4).
If you find one and the monitor won’t work, try resetting the PRAM (opt+cmd+p+r on startup, repeat 3-4 times).
I still have my B&W G3. I've upgraded it to a 550mhz G4. Added hard drives and 256 mb of ram. Also replaced the graphics card with the original Radeon card.
I absolutely love those beige boxes.
Same
This is my main vintage Mac solely because I love how it looks. Blue is my favorite color. I also have two matching Studio CRTs. It's been a great machine and I've upgraded the heck out of it.
My dad had one of these when I was a kid and man it was a beast. We had this and an eMac
I have a very tidy G3 B&W with the original keyboard and mouse, manuals and discs. Thanks to your video I didn't know about the motherboard revisions. Mine is the later one. I totally love the design of it, it's a great OS 9.2 machine and having the ADB was a great feature. The previous owner also put in a PCI serial port card.
love your content!
It was an awesome machine in its day. Wrote many a product on it and the G4 model that came after it. Still have a fully refurbed G4 in mint cond.
While this wasn’t my first computer, it was the first computer that felt like a power house you could create with. I got mine in Spring 1999 and I’ve held onto it ever since, I love the thing. Sadly I disposed of the 17” Studio Display as it was such a hunking great beast of a monitor and I just didn’t have the space, but I do have the 15” LCD now if I ever want to power the thing up.
I do like the first iMac's radical appearance - but I do not agree that the other Macs before that were dull, beige boxes. That goes from the Windows and OS/2 PC at the time! No, the Mac stood out with a deliberate industrial design and off-white Platinum color. It made them (well most of them), look fresh. One of the things I _love_ about Apples is how they make tech look so good.
I don’t think Beige boxes look bad, they just didn’t stand out. It’s like when Tesla was new they turned heads but now everyone has one so they no longer do.
@@mustasheolll2020 Isn't this how things usually go? We get used to it.
Fun fact: in Mach 1999 i seen in the MacWorld magazine the cover and an article regarding the new G3 PowerMac, and i new i wanted one and o wanted now. But i iam from Madeira Island in Portugal, and even though we had a small store that sold Apple stuff, will take months, and maybe a year to get this avaliable. So i done something crazy, went online, found a computer store in California and i called them, and i asked if they had the new G3 PowerMac, they said yes but i was in Europe so they couldn't do anything. So being amateur radio i new another amateur in California, so i wired the money to him via Western Union and i trusted him, i was nervous but fair enough a week later the DHL delivered the computer at home, a brand new 300Mhz G3 Blue & White at home, and what a machine, i still have it and it still works like the day i bought it. Only thing has a Rage 128 Pro graphic and G4 upgrade. Still ise it nowadays. I love this era of Macs. And yes mine come with the SCSI board.
That era of Apple keyboards was my favorite. I used one with my Windows XP computer for years.
A beautiful machine. Today's electronics need to have designs and colors with this much personality.