I’ve been saying for about the past 3 years that I need to replace my Mac (and before anyone gets excited no I still have the same Mac).

It’s now 5 and a half years old – the longest i’ve ever kept the same computer going and been through more upgrades than any other. In that time there has not been a single mac that I have wanted to buy to replace it. Apple’s systems with PPC processors are also not as easy (or cheap) to upgrade processors and even then the motherboard would hold it back.

I really wanted to replace it this summer, especially since I’m going to be going to Boston in September for my cousin’s wedding and could get a good deal if i “smuggle” it in with my luggage. However, the intel mac mini was a horrific disappointment with it’s low spec graphics and SATA laptop hard drive. Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole as it has waste of money written all over it. Am kinda hoping there’ll be a mini tower when apple upgrade the Powermac G5s to Intels in the next couple of months as that might actually tempt me.

If not, you never know with macs being so similar to wintels i might finally give in to my threats that i’ve been saying the past few years that i’d buy a wintel box and install linux on it! Having said that the other thing i’ve also been saying is the only thing that’s kept me a mac user is the OS, so maybe not!

Anyways, let me tell you a little bit about my current mac

Bought it, a 1st generation G4 Powermac 450MHz in September 2000. I actually got the 400MHz version a month previously not knowing that I couldn’t fit an internal CD burner despite being told I could do by the useless sales rep at PC World
I had it for one day all set up and took it back the next day on the premise that they could fit the second optical drive only to be told that not only was it not possible, but the sales rep who sold it to me wasn’t there that day (how convenient!).

At that point I’d had enough and returned the whole thing. A mate told me i should’ve locked out the DVD drive by putting in a region 1 and 2 disc repeatedly till it hardware locked the thing just to annoy them before returning it!
A month later I bought the next one up from a different shop (450MHz) knowing what I was getting into and it came with a zip drive which i thought might be useful and AGP which would be a huge benefit later.

Realising I had no way to copy files from my old mac to this one and also not having a floppy drive, I bought an external CD burner which used USB 1.1 and discovered a way to use the serial connectors through two modems to transfer files at 1k/s between the two macs. Neither were particularly good. In the end i bought an ethernet card for the old mac (much better) and the 2x/4x cd burner wasn’t brilliant.

I kept the original setup for a few years until i needed to buy OSX 10.2 which came with Quartz Extreme for which the ATI Rage Pro wasn’t supported. Living in my student house with windows users I realised there was a money saving way to upgrade the graphics card. I did my research and with this knowledge went to a computer fair and paid a very cheap £20 for a OEM Geforce 2 graphics card which was just good enough. We flashed the bios on a windows machine and it worked first time in OSX.

The next upgrade was the CaseMod which turned the machine into basically what it is now. It gave me what i wanted in the first place and relegated the external cd burner to the closet – anyone want a 4x matsushita cd burner which has been sat in a box for 3 years? Works perfectly well, it’s just very slow and worthless these days!

However, it now has two 120Gb internal hard drives and all the other good stuff. The zip drive it originally came with is sat on a shelf somewhere since no one else uses zip disks (esp 100Mb ones).

And if anyone’s after any replacement bits for their G4 case i’ve got one sat in the cupboard – i broke the logic board tray so i can’t use that but the rest is in perfectly good nick and not doing anything. Keep meaning to sell it off on ebay, but these days i can’t stand the place!

Well, there’s my rambling, I hope there’s good news at this summer’s WWDC August 7th-11th. And it will mean that I will be able to replace my long serving mac with something more modern, as it’s got to the point where I cannot upgrade the parts that I want to anymore as I found out when I tried to upgrade the graphics card. The conclusion I came to was that if I wanted to ebay was the only way to proceed.