Filed under: Desktops, Hardware, iMac, Apple
G3 iMac good enough for casual user?
The CRT iMacs will always hold a special place in my heart since my first Mac was a 'Blueberry' iMac (yes, I know the picture accompanying this post isn't a Blueberry iMac, it is an Indigo iMac) which is still being used today by my decidedly non-technical mother.However, does a five year old 400mz G3 iMac, that sports a processor that is three generations behind current offerings (G4, G5, and Core Duo) still cut the mustard for a casual user of OS X? According to Eugenia Loli-Queru, of OS News, it sure does. Tiger isn't as slow as you might think it would be (though that sentence is as horrible as you think it is) and for surfing the web and checking email the G3 iMac is a solid machine.
So, dear TUAW readers, anyone out there have a G3 with OS X on it as their main machine? How is it holding up?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 6)
Jesse said 4:06PM on 7-11-2006
I have a G3, 800mhz iBook with 640 RAM running Tiger, and it works fine. I use photoshop and iphoto with it fine, although it is a little slow.
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Chris Coleman said 4:07PM on 7-11-2006
I just got and IM today from a friend with a first-gen iBook who wants me to get her set up with it. It may not be the second revision, but she got it so long ago that I can't really remember. I'm talking clamshell, toilet seat style iBook. I have a feeling this may be a job for OS 9. It hurts to type that.
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andyakadum said 4:10PM on 7-11-2006
I have the one in the photo, plays sims, return to castle wolfenstein, quake 3 areana, max payne. It kicks arse.
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Liquidmark said 4:11PM on 7-11-2006
I have a 400 mhz G3 tower downstairs for houshold use. Right now, My Core Duo machine is my main one for work and all (I'm a freelance graphic artist). But I can do my work on the Tower as well if anything happens to my iMac. A very well machine.
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Ken C said 4:12PM on 7-11-2006
I have an iMac G4 800 MHZ 768 of Ram, OSX 10.4.7 running on it with a 60GB HD, gets a little slow if I am running lots of apps and it has been up for awile but pretty solid machine and gets the job done.
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Halopend said 4:15PM on 7-11-2006
I'm on a 500mhz G3 ibook. I'm running panther as opposed to tiger but still find the experience pleasant. The only thing my computer can't handle which is kind of annoying is all those flash based video players like youtube and google video. Oh and opening programs take forever. I'll upgrade eventually but for now will wait for info on 10.5 to surface to see if it'll cause any hiccups in currently available hardware.
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Dan Lurie said 4:17PM on 7-11-2006
Panther? Sure. Tiger? Not so much. I ran panther relatively fine on a 300MHZ iBook for a while before it kicked the bucket, and with RAM relatively cheap for the old iMacs, they work well for the less demanding user. (or users who have more patience than I do!)
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John Ellenich said 4:17PM on 7-11-2006
My mom uses a 350MHz G3 iMac as her "main" machine. She seems pretty happy with it- it's a little on the slow side, but never crashes, doesn't get viruses, and just keeps kicking.
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Cody Peacock said 4:18PM on 7-11-2006
i have a ibook 700 g3 with 640mb ram it does 90% of what i want to do but it gets the work done however i need help convincing my parents to get a macbook
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Chris Coleman said 4:18PM on 7-11-2006
Oh, and keep in mind that you need a DVD drive to install Tiger. That'll limit a few users, although I installed it onto my sister's old G3 iMac using target disk mode over firewire by booting to the DVD from another Mac.
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ChillyWilly said 4:19PM on 7-11-2006
One of my 4 Macs is a G3 500Mhz Indigo iMac running Tiger and it flies. I picked it up on eBay early this year for $45 and had to replace the CD-RW drive, as it was broken, but other than that, it works great. My fiance uses it for email, web and photos.
If I can find another good deal, I would get another one in a heartbeat.
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geezer said 4:21PM on 7-11-2006
I have a G3 366MHz iBook SE graphite with 320RAM, 6GB HD and am running OS X 10.3.9 on it. It does run pretty smoothly. I mainly use it for surfing the web (WLAN via USB stick), emails, MS Office X and did not have a single problem with this machine since i bought it back in 2000!
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Wheels said 4:22PM on 7-11-2006
I still have Monty, my G3/400mhz, 512MB grape iMac, and I had been using it, with Tiger, up until the end of April. It works excellent for day to day work. The only thing that showed Monty's age was when I tried watching newly encoded HD video content and vodcasts in iTunes - both were impossible to do. He could also be slowed up if I used high magnification in Photoshop to edit images. Other than that, the iMac worked fine.
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Andrew Wickliffe said 4:22PM on 7-11-2006
I've had a couple. First the CRT DV, which died, but still ran Tiger well enough (it was my first Tiger machine), and now the G3 from the year before. It's real slow, so the machine is delegated to doing fun stuff like auto-forwarding mail and download big files....
I wouldn't recommend a G3 for Tiger. One could do it, but it's not a good showcase for the OS.
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Andy Bennett said 4:25PM on 7-11-2006
My primary machine is an iBook 900 G3, running Tiger on 640 megs of RAM, like it OWNS the place.
My backup desktop/file server is a G3 233 running Jaguar... reluctantly. I would love to upgrade to Panther at least, but the system won't support it, and I can't get XPostFacto to work. Oh, well.
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Wesley Radcliffe said 4:27PM on 7-11-2006
I've got a 400mhz Blue and White in my room, its my apache/mysql/php server, along with being a file repository, (i've got a few 300 gig hds in it). With the 256mb of ram it came with, now it would be unuseable, but now that its got a gig of ram in it, it actually works a hell of a lot better than my friends 900mhz ibook. People who dont know mac's dont know its as old as it is.
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Aylwin said 4:28PM on 7-11-2006
I was doing fine until a year and a half ago with my iMac DV+ (G3 @ 450MHz, 320MB RAM, upgraded to 40GB hard drive). Then I got a 5MP camera and started trying to edit them in iPhoto and Photoshop. Other than that, I was generally happy doing light graphics work, emailing, and doing other schoolwork on Panther.
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Nate MC said 4:31PM on 7-11-2006
I've got quite a few customers that still use 400mhz machines every day. They would like to upgrade but just don't see the point when the machine they have does everything they need.
However the original iMac (233?) is grating to even surf the web with when the customer hasn't installed more than 32mb of ram.
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mattbrad said 4:32PM on 7-11-2006
For the most part, I run on a g4 ibook, 1.25. I do sport a grape and a snow, g3's. They are COMPLETELY solid. I often run frivilous apps on them while running serious apps (photoshop, premiere, ect). I get the 3 of them humming pretty good; moving back and forth between them (I have a pretty wide desk). I couldn't live with out them (maybe I could give one up). I would have thought it totally excessive, but once I got onto multiple machines, it would be tough to give up. I will rock my G3's for years to come...
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Jeff said 4:34PM on 7-11-2006
I have a clamshell iBook (466 Mhz I believe) and Tiger runs very slooow. Not worth the wait.
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