<p>Hello everyone,
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while since it is an incredibly interesting topic to me. I was wondering how many (if any. please one or this is gonna be the worst thread ever) of you guys still used a pretty old mac machine. By old, I would say probably an unsupported machine would suffice. I think the power mac g5’s may still be supported, may not. Thats the last of the power pc machines if they still are. I was wondering mainly because i’d like to know why you do and what your experience using it in 2011 is like. I really think that these now “vintage” computers are incredibly neat and still work mildly well for everyday tasks. I’m not looking for a pc/mac debate or anything. I just constantly hear about other people in my class who still use Power Mac G4s and older iMacs as semi-everyday machines. I know people will think its dumb to use them or whatever, but there really is something extremely neat about using a machine that used to be top of the line and seeing the progression of the technology through time. I personally own an ibook g4 12" which I use quite a bit for light web surfing and email. Its a very nice laptop and its still a reasonably quick machine. I also have a project Power mac G3 which i bought very cheap at a flea market. It doesn’t boot, but thats why its a project lol. These older PMs are incredibly cheap to work with and alot of fun to mess with. If you’re interested in that kind of stuff I’d really suggest picking one up. They extremely cheap.</p>
<p>The issue is though they drop in price in order to be price-competitive. So here are my probable thoughts:</p>
<p>Battery Life: I imagine a newer low-end would be better, due to advancements in energy performance for computer parts.
Quality/reliability: older high-end would win out, assuming it has not been used extensively. Laptops in frequent use are very vulnerable to have some aspect fail on in their life (can be as minor as consistently high temperatures to failing to boot and more) so it depends on how the laptop can hold over time.
Price: Probably old laptops, since sellers of them are more in the mindset of liquidation.</p>
<p>I’m still using my G5 20" iMac - it handles most things fine, but losing support for most programs is getting annoying. I’m still mad that I can’t stream Netflix on it - the screen + my speakers make for a great home-theatre in my dorm, and it’s a shame that I can’t access all of what Netflix has to offer. I do get the beachball of death on occasion, but not enough to be extremely annoying.</p>
<p>I plan on buying a macbook pro in the near future because my iMac is getting old, but I intend to keep it as an iTunes streamer/TV/secondary computer - it’s too pretty to give away!</p>
<p>I still use one of the original PowerMac G5 machines at home (single 1.8 GHz CPU). Because it is so simple to get to the guts of PowerMacs, they are super easy to mess with, but I am about done with this dinosaur. OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) only runs on Intel CPUs; OS X 10.7 (Lion) will come out soon and it will only run on Intel Core 2 Duo and higher machines. So, I’m replacing the PowerMac with a Mini.</p>
<p>Yeah i agree even the G5s are showing their age horribly these days. The support for PPC is awful and I think 10.4 Tiger has been completely abandoned. Its really depressing that these great computers are becoming less and less able to perform even basic tasks like web surfing. My ibook is actually pretty good for that stuff but it too is slow and the internet (especially flash) is god awful when trying to get any work done quickly. Thanks alot for your thoughts guys.</p>