HACKER Q&A
📣 gandalfff

Any Use for a Power Mac G4?


I have an old Power Mac G4 MDD on my hands and I was wondering if anyone could think of some cool uses for it!


  👤 AussieWog93 Accepted Answer ✓
Sell it, man. There's a huge market for vintage PCs like this - people love to run old games/software on the original machines they were designed for.

A quick look online suggests people value it around 2-3x as much as an i5 machine with 8GB RAM.


👤 amatecha
A PowerMac G4 will run the latest OpenBSD. https://www.openbsd.org/macppc.html I run it on one of my iMac G4's (and on many other non-PPC machines). It occurs to me that if you replace the HDD with an SSD it would also be quite a lot faster.

If you don't want to use it, toss it on Craigslist for sure (if you have a local Craigslist site). Depending on the specs and your location I'd expect around $50-75 CAD (basing this on Vancouver Canada area and habitually searching the words "macintosh", "powermac", "powerpc" etc. literally every day :) )


👤 renaudg
Of course, check out MorphOS.

Also relevant : https://lowendmac.com/



👤 markus_zhang
I bought a g4 laptop for vintage computing, but once the initial excitement retired I kept it on bookshelf. I don't regret buying it because it only cost 50 bucks including postal charge and even the battery still works.

So yeah I agree with a fellow commentor that if you don't know what to do maybe find someone who can pay premium and sell it.


👤 Epiphany21
OpenBSD 7.1 still offers the macppc port. It was pretty fast on my later G4s.

👤 themodelplumber
Nice, I used to use one of those at work! That was a weapon of mass creation back in the day. I don't know what counts as cool to you, but to me just using the thing as-outfitted seems pretty cool :D

👤 ralphc
Put Adelie Linux on it, and you'll still be able to browse when the cyberattacks take down all the x86 machines.

👤 sitkack
Running code destined for space, or the Xbox 1 or …

👤 Tijdreiziger
Does Linux support it? I recently installed Arch on my old MacBook ‘Early 2009’ (but that’s an Intel machine).

👤 freemint
Remove the head sink and reuse it for other projects, beyond that i had no use for mine.