DrunkenBlog

Ode to the Original PowerMac G3

It was with a heavy heart that I read that Yellow Dog Linux will be dropping support for 'old-world' macs with the advent of their upcoming new fedora-based distro, meaning that the beige G3 machines have just been struck another blow.

The old 233MHz iMacs are supported, as they're 'new world', meaning their ROM is loaded into memory and actually jammed onto the motherboard.

I'd love to have a chat with these guys, as I can't really speak to the business decisions behind the move which are likely solid for the company since they're now all about offering an alternative to people who want to use PowerPC hardware but don't, for whatever reason, want to use MacOS X and they're suddenly not really the only player on the block with the surge of Gentoo. But there's still a sadness. YDL, especially with a light window manager, was a fairly easy way to breathe new life into a machine that simply refuses to die.

Which is part of why I find the beige G3 so endearing. A realization I came to awhile ago was that the last two computer models that Apple put out that I could unequivocally recommend to new users all existed when Apple had a six-striped logo. They might hurt your wallet, but you really just didn't have to worry about them as machines. These were the days when you paid a hell of a lot more but got a hell of a lot more.

A bunch might not agree, but if I had to pick a favorite laptop Apple has pushed out in the last decade it would be the Powerbook 1400c. Its keyboard still feels better than anything else I've used since, and the machines just didn't have the reliability issues that have so plagued Apple portables (remember, they're not laptops anymore).

Yeah they used a 33.3MHz PowerPC 603e, but that's not really the point. This, to me, is the reference laptop Apple should be striving to in terms of durability, quality, and feel. Hell they even pioneered skinning to an extent, shipping them with nifty little printer cutouts that you could slide under a transparent cover on the lid.

The worse thing that could be said about the 1400 series are that it wasn't speedy and was pretty damn expensive, listing for $3500-$4,000 or so when it was introduced. But out of the three I've owned, the most ongoing issue with them are the failing batteries, and just what a bitch it can be to actually get a new battery for them that hasn't been sitting on a shelf so long that its worthless.

Which isn't to say that there haven't been good PowerBook models since, but this was really the golden age of Apple laptops. You had the 3400, which might be a better laptop, but with an entry list price of $6400 it just wasn't a model I got a lot of experience with. You also had the 2400 series of notebooks, Apples sub-notebook, which still has a cult following in Japan but again isn't a model I had a lot of experience with. But in my limited dealings, the 1400 series just stole my heart. I'll admit to also having a big soft spot for the 520 series (the blackbirds) but they're a full generation back.

Now remember we're not talking about modern speeds but rather build quality and value. If you're really curious about what I mean by 'the golden age of Apple portables', I suppose a cliff note version would be that these were the last machines where Apple knew how to design a hinge and you measured your computer in experience by the machines lifetime and not how often it had to be sent in for repair. Someone could well make the argument that you could buy three reasonable iBooks for the same price and just use one while the other two are in various states of being repaired.

Going back to the beige G3; it was the generational equivalent to these laptops of the day and is the current Python-esque Black Knight that just won't die no matter how many blows it takes. There have been other models Apple has put out like this, many of which still run and are useful but I don't think we've seen this kind of attitude from a machine since the IIfx days or the original Apple II.

And make no mistake about it... this machine has attitude and has been a long, long headache for Apple since the advent of OSX, even engendering a mighty class action lawsuit regarding their claims that it was built to run the new OS. The real problem is that they just did too good of a job. To go back, these machines originally started rolling out a good seven years ago, with two form factors: desktop and tower. They were an interesting model at the time, continuing the push to simplify the product line and replacing several other ranges of models.

At the time, Apple was coming off the 7600/8600/9600 series, which were good solid machines running 604e CPUs which had replaced the 7500/8500/9600. There wasn't much of note from a technical standpoint in the *600 over the *500, but there'd been some real industrial design work done in the tower cases. The previous generation had been something of an industrial design travesty: while the 8500 series was a solid machine, it was insanely difficult to do something as simple as adding/removing more RAM. I'm not kidding, it was a bit of a joke. We're talking about having to practically remove the logic board, and there was a government notice warning hemophiliacs against trying to open them due to the guaranteed nicks and cuts they'd walk away with. Note I'm specifically talking about the towers; the 7500, which was a desktop, was a kick-ass piece of kit.

The beige G3 brought the easy-open case which was a bit of a marvel at the time, and is primarily separated from its later counterparts by the fact that you actually had to unplug things from the back of the case before you unfolded it and really got at the guts.

It was beige, and *gasp* plastic, but there were little details like the neon green recessed power button and colored tab to open the side, and a lack of sharp edges. Subtle swoops and curves in the plastic gave it a sturdy yet refined appeal before Apple decided to subject the world to the colored-plastic abomination otherwise known as 'blueberry'. And no, it doesn't look better in person.

The CPU speed eventually ranged from 266MHz to 333MHz, which was slower than the top speed of the 350MHz 604e which it replaced, but the backside cache wasn't just marketing and while there were some cases were the 604e would best it, on the whole the G3 was a marvel of speed in a much cheaper design.

The G3 also plugged in via a ZIF slot (zero insertion force) and bus and CPU speeds were controlled via tiny jumpers on the motherboard. There was also a lot of overhead in the G3, so you were often able to squeeze a nice little boost out of your machine by overclocking it up to the next performance range. The ZIF slot also created a decent market for processor upgrades, meaning you can bump your beige G3 to an 800MHz G3 for ~$200, or a 533MHz G4 for $150, or a 1GHz G4 for $400 or anywhere in between. Sure that G4 will be sucking its data from a 66MHz straw, but there's still a hell of an improvement for a 7 year old machine.

These are fond speed days to remember, with Apple airing a lovely series of commercials aimed at Intel that were beyond amusing and started giving them just the slightest bit of bite, or cool-factor, which was direly needed to try to cover up the aftertaste of the latter Performa series they shipped. Some of the earlier Performas are great machines, even if using them is kinda like trying to browse the web via a Nintendo, but anything based on the 603e was pure crap.

Apple didn't really skimp on components either, starting them off with 128 megs of RAM, and they were lucky enough to be popular during the big RAM crash, so all of a sudden people were plugging what seemed to be insane amounts of memory into these things at the time. Very common for for these to be hanging around with 768 megs, although you'll often find them with 384 megs.

They also came standard with an ATI Pro Turbo card with upgradable VRAM slots on the motherboard which is more than amusing to see. 10Base-T was included, although lots of configurations shipped with 100Base-T. All models shipped with an internal ZIP drive, which was probably its biggest failing due to their well-known click o' death, and its worth mentioning that an Ultra SCSI card was included in the higher end configs in addition to the ATA support, as well as a fast 24x (for its time) CD drive.

But the really, really interesting thing about these machines was Apples' move to simplifying the product line. Rather than 3 separate motherboards for 3 models with different capabilities, Apple moved to what was called the 'Gossamer' logic board, which was not only very compact but featured a 'personality slot' which allowed them to drop in a card with specific A/V features. This sounds like common sense now, but it was continuing a major break with Apples history where, and I swear to gawd, the most trivial differences were an excuse to spin off a new product line. This wasn't perfect yet, as there were still high-end desktops and towers whose price difference wasn't large so in many cases it was whether or not you had the space for a tower... but it was a start.

The merging of the product lines was probably the biggest controversy about the machine (at the time) because there were a ton of people who were really, really unhappy that Apple wasn't offering a 9600-style case anymore with lots of drive bays, but more notably half the PCI slots were ripped out. These were primarily high-end audio and high-end visual guys, and they were seriously not happy and it was quite the stink the day... and yes, there were people who needed all those slots. They weren't the majority by far, but they were there, they were pissed, and they helped fund the short-lived PCI-expansion boxes that would sit on your desk next to your computer to provide more PCI slots.

There was a more minor controversy in that the 604e chip was tailored for multi-CPU setups, but the G3 was more of a 603e with a backside cache which gave it a huge boost, especially in integer calculations, although it was a bit weak on floating point. Interestingly enough, the G4 was more of a refined 604e, meaning it did just fine in integer and great at floating point, whereas the G5 is a floating point monster but a bit weak at integer. Ok, maybe not that interesting if you're not me.

The other controversy which I've touched on before was that of OSX, and why Apple got sued in a big way. Apple, in the days of Rhapsody, didn't have OSX ready to ship but did have the G3 towers, but didn't want people holding off their hardware purchases while they waited and made the claim that these machines were "built for OSX and would be fully supported". The fully supported part was what bit them in the ass.

There were two main problems with the beige G3 and OSX:

• A severe lack of VRAM and slower onboard video just simply couldn't handle what Quartz was trying to do. Remember Rhapsody didn't have Quartz in the spec; and huge amounts of machines Apple has sold since the release of OSX have problems running Quartz in 32-bit color let alone supporting Quartz Extreme.
  
• Limitations built into the on-board ATAPI controller create real problems for installing OSX on larger drives. Basically the OS has problems finding the system if its not on the first 8-gigs of a partition, and even then it can be problematic to get it installed. YDL isn't the best at these situations either, in that it has some problems with the Ultra SCSI card shipped with most of these. But if you're installing Linux, chances are you can read through the docs and do the partitioning workarounds; but asking general consumers to do this isn't realistic.

But, if you'll recall, there was one hell of a lag between when Rhapsody was supposed to ship and when MacOS X actually did, and you'd be remarkably surprised at just how zippy a beige 300MHz G3 running OS9 with 768 megs of RAM will feel when doing Photoshop or other Quark or other design-oriented tasks. If you'll also recall, even when OSX did ship there was a lot of lag between it being a technology demo or hobbyist OS and it moving to the mainstay, especially in the creative markets where OS9 is still strong. Many of these users would switch over to OSX, play around to get a feel but then realize everything they used felt slow and was less stable (but perfectly fine in OS9). So then they'd reboot back into OS9 to get their work done. At the time, this being OS9, rebooting wasn't the "OMFG I can't believe they made me reboot" stigma that it is today.

There was also the MHz stagnation that occurred with the G4, where there really just wasn't a whole lot of movement for a long period of time. Pretty much just hung out at 500MHz, and altivec-enabled software wasn't exactly pervasive, so having a 266-300MHz machine meant that while you weren't on the high end, you were doing just damn fine depending on your work, again especially if it was OS9, although they were perfectly serviceable if you were just doing email/web in OSX but they weren't a treat to use. The MHz stagnation period is something that often gets glossed over when people go "They're 7 year old machines! Upgrade!" but it should be remembered that for way, way too many of those 7 years technology wasn't progressing very fast in the Apple world.

Of course now we're at dual 1.8-2GHz and a ~366MHz G3 based machine starts to look more than a little quaint if you're trying to run iPhoto or iMovie. Even the original iMac does, but the iMac doesn't pose that big of a problem for Apple in terms of how poorly it deals with OSX... mostly because they just weren't made as well and they weren't as expandable.

The problem with the beige G3s is that they refuse to die: they're built too well. They have that quality about them that I look for in all my computer purchases... they want to work. If you stop and think about it, not everything made really wants to do what its supposedly built to do. The recent Ford car commercial comes to mind where the car silently screaming to its driver that its abusing it by leaving it parked.

Just to touch on this for a moment, often times when people are looking back through old-school Apple subaculture[sic] they focus on the 'Insanely Great' aspect, which is a part. But that's the part that engenders excitement and the sickos (whom marketing companies love) who start incorporating the idea that what they buy makes a statement about who they are. The other part is loyalty.

Unless you get a particularly sociopath puppy from the mall the thing is going to be happy to see you until the day it dies. It's the unconditional love thing. You walk in, its tail wags and its ready to go. It always wants to be used, to go to work, even if that work is playing... its happiest when its hanging out doing things with you, and it's always there waiting to go. There's a reliability there that you turn to when times are hard, which caused you to bond and suddenly you're loyal back.

Some hardware has this quality- I'd submit that the beige G3 does, whereas the Titanium Powerbook, whose battery would disconnect causing it to shut off if you even picked it up wrong, didn't. Other Apple hardware (and other manufactures too) have this quality; hell I have a Performa 520 sitting in its box that I love simply because the thing loves to work. The beige G3 has just gone a little beyond this, in that due to its capabilities it's been able to keep working through modern tasks. It just sorta sits there in the corner giving you the eye, suggesting that if you just gave it $100 worth of RAM to max it out it'd be able to handle a lot more than you'd think because it wouldn't have to swap, or if you just dropped $100 and replaced the CPU you'd get a nice 50-300%+ performance boost for a lot of tasks. And besides, it kinda sorta misses your touch.

Nowadays we have these girly-man computers which just whimper all the fucking time. Use them too hard while holding them in your lap and you'll end up sterile or it'll do its own version of bitching (otherwise known as the high-RPM fans). Open and close them one time too many and stuff breaks off. Want to squeeze out a little bit more power by throwing in an upgrade and they clam up as though you've just asked your girlfriend if maybe, just possibly, it might be fun to invite another woman home sometime and all of a sudden she wants to know what's wrong with her and why she isn't enough for you and refuses to do anything and wants to go stay at its mothers while it works things out.

If you're lucky, you can still pick up beige G3s from schools or universities in large batches for about $50 apiece. I know I picked up six this way and dolled them out to friends who didn't have a computer at the time, or used it as an excuse to futz around with things I didn't want to do on my main machine. Hard drives may go bad, but a remarkable amount of these came with SCSI, and you can always slap in a cheaper ATA drive. Power supplies can often go bad in computers, but there's something special about the beige G3 PSU that's given it a low failure rate over the years, even in harsh environments like an educational setting. Oddly enough, the most common things that will be wrong with them are a dead PRAM battery ($6) which causes it to not remember what decade it is between reboots, or a dead Zip drive, often with the offending disk still in it.

I don't know about you, but a part of me feels sick about throwing a machine that wants to work into a landfill, simply because the original maker has no interest in it anymore, not when there may well be tasks it can do. OS9 can very well be an option, but its becoming less of one as time goes on. For me its very much a lack of software or capabilities; they aren't exactly releasing web browsers for OS9 anymore, and its not as though OS9 runs apache and having the whole computer lock up while someone is browsing the web (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer) is just a drag. Which means you'll want something like OSX, except Apple doesn't want to sell it to you, and even if they did it runs like ass.

Enter... Linux. YDL had done a great job of taking Red Hats' distribution, porting it to PowerPC and adding lots of Mac-specific trimmings to make the transition a little smoother than one might expect. Little things, like the little LED on powerbooks throbbing when the machine was put to sleep, just like OSX, kinda go a long way.

Installing on the beige G3s still wasn't as easy as it can be for newer machines, but once it was on things were a hell of a lot zippier than OSX. You had to trade away things like the iApps or the gooey Aqua interface, but in its place you got an environment with modern guys (protected memory, preemptive multitasking, etc.) and a whole host of capabilities above and beyond OS9. Depending on your needs, they made fantastic extra machines, especially if you had 384-768 megs of RAM like many of them did. Basic productivity tasks that would just crawl in OSX just aren't a problem when using Linux on the same hardware, primarily due to the lack of Quartz. Throw on MySQL or Apache for an impromptu local-but-separate web-dev environment.

The one problem that was starting to rear its head is that the two most popular windowing environments for Linux, Gnome and KDE, are starting to get a little bloated for low end machines although its nothing like what happens if you subject them to OSX. But, depending on what you're doing, you really can tell the difference by switching to a lighter window manager... so it's very sad to see support dropped for them from YDL.

Ah well. You may have been dealt another blow, my favorite of the PowerMac G3s, but I for one salute you.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    July 24, 2004, at 01:15 AM