Apple Mac mini G4

I looked back at my eBay history. It looks like I bought it way back in 2021, longer ago than it feels... They don't have a brand, and the listing is long gone, but here is the description on my invoice: 2 Pack M.2 NGFF SATA SSD to 2.5 inch IDE 44PIN Converter Adapter with Case Unit price $17.98 I did a Mac Mini and also a Powerbook G4. They work great in both.

Not surprised that it's easy to do with NixOS, but that is a brute force method, it's just easy to implement with the way NixOS works. I remember I had G4 Mac mini and one of the first gen intel macbook pros - you could have use one of them as a hard-drive and boot from it via Firewire. Work magically.

IME NetBSD or OpenBSD are better supported options on New World Macs. I run NetBSD/macppc on a G4 Mac mini and it "just works" (tm).

If you're looking for a late PPC Mac to run esoteric PPC operating systems or PPC Mac stuff, the MDD G4 is a great machine if you need dual processors, expandability, and more than 1 GB of RAM. But if you don't, you're much better off getting a Mac mini G4. I'm biased because I have a hobby business selling SSD upgraded ones running a hacked Mac OS 9 [0]. But compared to the MDD G4, the Mac mini G4: - Uses a fraction of the energy - Takes up a fraction of the space - Largely can run the same operating systems - Is much quieter (as the article alludes to, the MDD G4 is loud) - For single core can actually be faster going all the way up to 1.5 GHz (MDD can go there with an accelerator) - Has more integrated parts so has less parts that can fail There are some cons to the G4 mini versus the MDD G4 though: - Almost no expandability - Limited to 1 GB of RAM - No dual processors - The hacked version of Mac OS 9 needs USB sound and some models can have some display incompatibilities at high resolutions But for the vast majority of applications these don't matter much. 0: https://os9.shop

Yes, the Mac Mini G4 is an amazing machine to own. I sold mine. I am sad. I would like to have another, but the one I had was falling part and someone gave me like $50 for it. It is extremely versatile though.

I've got one few years ago - sister was using it for a bit till something else could be managed. It came with a replaced hdd and removed airport card, and old battery. I managed to install Lubuntu side by side with 10.4 but mid-pandemic decided to try some retro fun and deployed dualboot with MacOS 9.0.4 and dug thru Macintosh Garden depths. What's interesting is that machine managed to download updates for 10.4.

The depth of this article is wonderful. The PowerPC line did have lots of good things going for it, and the Mac mini G4 is a good example of how much you can get done with modest space, power and heat. I'm still using Mac mini G4s in several places, both for Mac OS X (legacy Final Chop) and as small, low power servers running NetBSD. There are really only two drawbacks to the Mac mini G4, in my opinion: Gigabit ethernet would've been a dollar or two more? Being stuck with 100 Mbps, or around 300 Mbps if one uses a gigabit USB adapter, isn't fun. If the DIMM slot could take 2 gig DIMMs, this'd be a perfect machine. Other PowerPC Macs could take 2 gigs - heck, even the older PowerPC 604e Power Macs 9500 and 9600 could take 1.5 gigs - so being limited to 1 gig is a bit unfortunate, especially considering that 2 gig DDR DIMMs are a thing (later Xserve G5 units could take 2 gig DDR DIMMs). Still, the Mac mini G4 is the only computer aside from SBCs that I've bought brand new, and I have always been very happy with my decision.

This is a great comprehensive article on the "why" and there are good YouTube videos on the "how." What the article is missing that makes it even better is putting an SSD in which makes it even faster of course. You can get an untested Mac mini G4 for about $60 on eBay and the rest of the parts (SSD, PATA-mSATA adapter, RAM if less than 1 GB, power adapter, any missing screws, clock battery, etc.) will run you another $60 to make the ultimate Mac OS 9 machine. If you're comfortable taking things apart and putting them back together it's not too bad. A quick tip: be sure to reset the PRAM with command-alt-p-r holding down during restart until you hear 3 chimes. Then while the machine is booting hold down command-alt-o-f and type "reset-nvram" and then "set-defaults" and then "reset-all" (all of this is in open firmware) before installing Mac OS 9 to make sure firmware is in its original state. I came across this idea of SSD upgrading and installing Mac OS 9 in April 2024 and bought three broken ones to build one for my son. [0] When the first one worked, I ended up figuring, why not just finish the other two and sell them on eBay? That led me into a hobby business. I've now cleaned, upgraded with SSDs, and sold about 70 of them. The "business" basically breaks even, so it truly is a hobby. In fact I invested so much in inventory buying 90 of them in a lot at the end of 2024 that I am negative right now. I will probably turn a slight profit in 2025. But it's fun and if you want…

I think I can speak to this a bit since I run a hobby business[0] selling restored Mac mini G4s (originally from 2005) with a hacked version of Mac OS 9 on them from Mac OS 9 Lives so that retro computer users (people still using production software for Mac OS 9) can have the fastest possible machine to run classic Mac OS. After selling more than 60 of them, my customers (from what I can tell) are largely in five categories: - People doing this for their kids so the kids can use the software of their parent's youth (my own motivation that led me to fall into this [1]) - People doing this for work (still using old music production software for example) - People doing this because they care about historical software (had a couple museum curators buy one) - People who are tinkerers but want to tinker with software not hardware so they buy from me - Retro gamers In all of these cases I don't think it's really about feeling old or young. It's just about doing something that they perceive as better than they can achieve on a modern machine. And by "better" I mean better to them. Not objectively better. They just love those games from the 90s. Or they just think that the educational software back then was less addictive/better for their kids than the software today. Sure, if we think about anything from our distant past it can make us feel old. But I think it's more that this hobby (or work) actually serves a purpose for these customers and they don't think along the old/young axis.…

Just spent a fair amount of time figuring out how to make a Mac Mini G4 with Snow Leopard (10.5.8) usable as my home bastion for when I want to access my home systems remotely. The biggest issues are that Safari and sshd are so old they're basically useless. - I don't really need a browser on that machine, but for comfort I replaced Safari with the no longer updated but still usable TenFourFox browser. Log into your ppc system and type 'machine' at the prompt. Use the value it shows to choose which version to download from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tenfourfox/files/fpr32.5/ - For sshd replacement I installed Dropbear as I couldn't get openssh to build. To get Dropbear to build I had to: 1. Comment out "LTC_CFLAGS += -Wno-nullability-completeness" in libtomcrypt/makefile_include.mk and libtommath/makefile_include.mk (as the C compiler didn't know that option). 2. In default_options_guard.h after the #ifndef related to DROPBEAR_SVR_PAM_AUTH, add "#define DROPBEAR_SVR_PASSWORD_AUTH 0" and "#define DROPBEAR_SVR_PAM_AUTH 1" (as OS X needs PAM to log in). 3. Build with: ./configure --enable-pam make PROGRAMS="dropbear dbclient dropbearkey dropbearconvert scp" sudo make install 4. Start the new Dropbear ssh server on port 2222 as follows: mkdir /etc/dropbear /usr/local/sbin/dropbear -F -E -R -p 2222 You can then ssh into the machine as before (ssh -p2222 user@host) and things like port forwarding work fine. Nice feeling to have a G4 Mini still doing something useful!

Same for me. Bought the entry-level g4 mac mini, and it led to another mini, two macbooks, and ipod, iphone, and 3 ipads.

Self promotion but relevant: I have a hobby business doing something very similar, except I focus on a specific model—pretty much the most power efficient PowerPC desktop Mac you can get that can still run Mac OS 9, the Mac mini G4. It's at https://os9.shop