Apple Power Macintosh G4 (M7893F/A) Mac Desktop

I just acquired a used Apple Power Mac G4 tower with 15" inch LCD monitor and even though this machine is a few of years old, it still rocks!

I have tried the amazing G5 Power Mac and I admit that the latest generation desktop from Apple is the best machine today...however, I was amazed at how powerful an old Power Mac like the G4 tower could be.

The G4 tower, at that time came in a 450 Mhz, 500 Mhz, and dual 500 Mhz configurations. The machine I use has the dual 500 Mhz setup with three 36 gigabyte SCSI hard drives and a full gigabyte of RAM. The optical drive is a DVD-RAM but does not burn movies which could play on a standard home DVD but this drive is used for massive data, non video, storage. For smaller storage this machine has a built in Iomega 100 zip drive and like all modern macs, there is no floppy drive.

Since most PC users are not familiar with Apple's use of dual processors, the first processor is what does most of the work and the second processor is rarely fully utilized. But for a heavy duty graphics program like the popular Adobe Photoshop (from version 5.5 and beyond), the second processor is used and it speeds up graphics instructions. And today's latest Macintosh operating system, OS X, utilizes the power of the second processor to expedite navigating through instructions.

For those of you who are PC people, it was Apple Inc who first widely used the 1.44 MB floppy drive and it was Apple again who ditched it when they introduced the company-saving iMac in late 1998. Since much of the market for Macs revolve around graphics, a floppy disk does not usually hold enough storage to hold most graphics files.

A zip drive holds eighty times more on a disk so it is ideal for storing graphics files but does not make any difference when holding text documents. One would have to type an incredible amount to fill up a 100 MB zip disk.

When I play DVD movies on the machine's optical drive, I find that there is very little skipping and noise distortion but after a couple of hours, sometimes the volume tends to drop off so I have to increase the volume of the movie.

The machine was released when Mac OS 9.1 came out and that was a very fortunate thing for this machine since the previous rendition of this operating system, Mac OS 9.0 was plagued with some software bugs. Apple has since replaced OS 9,1 with 9.2 and then abandoned the 9.x series of operating systems altogether. Today, Apple Inc exclusively uses Mac OS X but the newer, sleeker operating system will still work on this machine if I choose to install it.

I have one small complaint about the machine when I boot it up. With two very physically hot processors, Apple decided to use some very strong and loud fans and sometimes the noise can be distracting. The Power Mac G5 uses more fans but with slower rotors so the air is not being pushed through the machine so loudly and violently. In comparison the old G4 dual Power Mac is much louder than the dual G5 Power Mac.

Overall, for a graphics machine, email and internet machine, and a movie watching machine, the dual Power Mac G4 is a great computer if you are fortunate enough to still find one used. I would say that the Power Macs, G4 and G5 both, are great gaming machines, but compared to the PC world, it is not easy to find the same selection of games compatible with the Mac platform and this has been one of the weak points of owning a Mac.

For my purposes, I give this computer 4 stars.

Update April 2005:

I still use this machine as my primary computer and there are no problems yet, and I am still using OS 9.

I plan to put OS X on it and see how this machine takes it.