Foxstar508

Logic Board: Ports: Power: Processor: G4, 350, 400, 450, 500: USB: 2: Max Watts: 200: PMMU: integrated: ADB: n/a: Amps: FPU: integrated: Video: 15 pin VGA, or DVI. How to Install RAM in Your Power Mac G4 You should probably get a little $5 device called the wrist wrap, also called a grounding strap (picture below). We haven’t had anything short out on us when we’ve been working on our Macs, but these little devices help ground static electricity as a precaution. A PowerMac G4 reset button rescue story We've reported several times in the past that resetting a Mac's logic board can sometimes revive a system that will not turn on. As explained by Knowledge. The Power Macintosh G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors 2003) was released on June 23, 2003, alongside the new Power Macintosh G5. It replaced the six month old Power Mac G4 (FireWire 800) that came before it. Unlike its successor, the Power Macintosh G4 (MDD 2003) lacked a G5 processor, aluminum enclosure and USB 2.0.

1. Power Mac G4 Specs
2. Power Mac G4 Manual Quotes Digital Download

It’s July 18, 2000, and the Macworld staff has assembled in New York City for the next day’s kickoff of Macworld Expo. We’ve got plans for online coverage as Apple makes its product announcements, followed by the team fanning out onto the trade show floor to cover every new product on display, from Apple and all the other companies that attend the show.

That evening, our boss, Macworld Editor-in-Chief Andy Gore, calls an emergency meeting in his hotel suite. In his possession is a manila folder full of documents. In fact, it’s the entire Apple press kit for the next day’s keynote. Some source at Apple has handed Macworld the crown jewels—on the condition that we not post anything until the products are announced. It was a sort of unofficial embargo.

That’s how I met the Power Mac G4 Cube: a spec sheet and a press release. My colleagues and I spent the next 12 hours writing, so that the very second that Apple announced the Cube (and a new palette of G3 iMacs), we could drop detailed stories on the web, as if we had known what was coming all along. Because we did.

Later on keynote day I got a chance to see the Cube in person for the first time. It was just as unusual as I had imagined.

Design ideals

For years now I’ve talked about something I call Jobs’s Law, which is that laptops need to get thinner and lighter over time. That’s one design principle that it’s possible to intuit by observing the classic Steve Jobs/Jony Ive design collaboration from a distance. There are others.

One of them is what you might call the ideal of the Black Box. Apple’s designs frequently attempt to create small, dense objects that are packed with as much technology as possible—including technology that exists specifically to make that density work. Wrap that small object in a pleasant exterior (or if you’re NeXT, a literal black box) and you’ve created a bit of magic technology. Don’t look inside, or you’ll spoil the surprise.

There are plenty of examples of this in Apple history, such as the Apple TV, the Mac mini, the 2013 Mac Pro, and the base of the iMac G4. And you could argue that Apple’s black-box ideals positioned it perfectly for the mobile revolution and devices like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

But perhaps the best example of the Black Box Apple product is the Power Mac G4 Cube. It was a dense eight-inch (20cm) cube of technology, suspended in a lucite sheath. Its ambition is right in the name. The power of a Power Mac—a G4 processor, a vertical slot-loading optical drive, hard drive, RAM, video card, and an array of ports—was all packed into that tiny space.

It had no speaker, though. Instead, in a quirk perhaps picked up from the integrated Bose sound system in the Twentieth Anniversary Mac, the Power Mac G4 Cube included a pair of clear, round Harman Kardon speakers.

It also lacked two items that would surely be high on a list of items Jobs and Ive hated putting in their products: fans and buttons. In the case of the G4 Cube, both decisions cut off this Mac’s nose to spite its face. The computer was never able to properly cool itself using its bottom-to-top convection chimney design¹, which caused plenty of component failures. And the touch-sensitive power button was far too easily triggered by a stray finger or even a passing disturbance in the force.

These sorts of quirks made the Power Mac G4 Cube a lot less appealing, but let’s be clear: the thing had sheer gadget magnetism. It looked like a prop out of a sci-fi movie, and looked even better when connected to its speakers and an Apple Studio Display. (Even the Cube’s large external power brick has some style, sheathed in aluminum and covered with tiny vent holes.)

My favorite feature of the Cube might be the pop-out handle on the bottom. To Apple’s enormous credit, the G4 Cube was an accessible black box. You could get to the interior of the Cube by flipping it on its back and pushing on a handle to pop it out with a satisfying click. Then you could lift the cube’s interior out of its aluminum skin, which was attached to the lucite holder. The act of opening up a G4 Cube even beats the Blue-and-White Power Mac G3 in terms of drama.

It failed

Less than a year after the G4 Cube was announced, having sold far fewer units than Apple expected, it was put on ice. The press release announcing the death of the Cube is a pulled punch with an audience of one. Steve Jobs obviously loved this product and though he had apparently been convinced it was a flop, the press release hadn’t reached the final stage of grief:

Apple® today announced that it will suspend production of the Power Mac™ G4 Cube indefinitely. The company said there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future, but that there are no plans to do so at this time.

For all the myth-building around Steve Jobs’s return to Apple, it’s important to remember that the early years of his return were full of flails and fails. The Power Mac G4 Cube was one of the highest-profile failures as Jobs and his team tried to figure out the right path forward for innovation in the computer world.

I keep wondering if Apple could have done something different to make the Cube a success. John Gruber has suggested to me that perhaps it would’ve worked with a G3 processor, which would have taxed the Cube’s fanless cooling system a lot less. Perhaps, but with G3 performance Apple couldn’t have charged anything near $1,799 for it.)

That price, too… the Cube cost more than the Power Mac G4, which meant Cube buyers had to pay a premium for cool design. Some did, of course, but I suspect most people saw it as a bad deal.

Really, if you pull on one thread the entire tapestry unravels. The Cube was an expensive product to make, and that made it expensive to buy, and that limited its appeal. Couple that with the fact that its design technically limited it in terms of cooling, component reliability, and upgrades, and you’ve got a product that was simply too much, too soon.

Apple would do better with the Black Box approach later. In 2005, Apple announced the Mac mini, which is very much a budget version of the G4 Cube concept. And the Mac mini was so successful that, 15 years later, it’s still with us.

Still, no Mac mini has ever had the sheer design appeal of that eight-inch cube suspended in lucite. There might be a bunch of Mac minis in museums, but they’re all probably positioned behind the scenes, running the lighting systems. The G4 Cube, on the other hand, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

It’s just a success of a different kind, I suppose.

I’ll be back next week with number seven.

Power Mac G4 Specs

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The Power Mac G4 is a series of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1999 to 2004 as part of the Power Macintosh line. Built around the PowerPC G4 series of microprocessors, the Power Mac G4 was marketed by Apple as the first 'personal supercomputers',^[1] reaching speeds of 4 to 20 gigaFLOPS. This was the first existing Macintosh product to be officially shortened as 'Mac', and is the last Mac able to boot into classic Mac OS.

The enclosure style introduced with the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue and White) was retained through the entire five-year production run of the Power Mac G4, albeit with significant changes to match Apple's evolving industrial design and to accommodate increasing cooling needs. The G4 and its enclosure were retired with the introduction of the Power Mac G5.

PCI Graphics/AGP Graphics/Gigabit Ethernet[edit]

The original Power Mac G4 was introduced at the Seybold conference in San Francisco on August 31, 1999.^[2] There were two variants, officially titled Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) with 400 MHz, 450 MHz and 500 MHz configurations available, and Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics), with 350 MHz and 400 MHz configurations. Colloquially, this generation of Power Mac is referred to as 'Graphite', owing to the colors of the case being similar to the iMac G3 Graphite.

Apple originally planned to ship the 500 MHz configuration in October 1999, but they were forced to postpone this because of poor yield of the CPUs. In response, Apple reduced the clock speed of the processor in each configuration by 50 MHz (making the options 350 MHz, 400 MHz and 450 MHz), which caused some controversy because they did not lower the original prices accordingly.^[3]

The early 400 MHz (later 350 MHz) PCI-based version used a motherboard identical to the one used in Power Macintosh G3 (Blue and White) computers including the use of Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) processors sockets^[4] (minus the ADB port), in a 'graphite' colored case and with the new MotorolaPowerPC 7400 (G4) CPU. The higher-speed models, code name 'Sawtooth', used a greatly modified motherboard design with AGP 2x graphics (replacing the 66 MHz PCI slot).

The PCI variant was discontinued at the end of 1999.^[5]

The machines featured DVD-ROM drives as standard. The 400 MHz and 450 MHz versions had 100 MBZip drives as standard equipment, and as an option on the 350 MHz Sawtooth. This series had a 100 MHzsystem bus and four PC100SDRAM slots for up to 2 GB of RAM (1.5 GB under Mac OS 9). The AGP Power Macs were the first to include an AirPort slot and DVI video port. The computers could house a total of three hard drives, two 128 GB ATA hard drives and up to a single 20GB SCSI hard drive, with the installation of a SCSI card.

The 500 MHz version was reintroduced on February 16, 2000, accompanied by 400 MHz and 450 MHz models. DVD-RAM and Zip drives featured on these later 450 MHz and 500 MHz versions and were an option on the 400 MHz.

Power Mac G4 Manual Quotes Digital Download

The Power Mac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) model was introduced at Macworld ExpoNew York on July 19, 2000; the new revision included dual-processor 450 MHz and 500 MHz versions, and a low-end single CPU 400 MHz model. It was also the first personal computer to include gigabit Ethernet as standard. Most people saw this revision as a stopgap release, because higher clocked G4s were not available; the G4’s Motorola XPC107 “Grackle” PCI/Memory controller prevented the G4 from hitting speeds higher than 500 MHz.^{[citation needed]} The dual 500 MHz models featured DVD-RAM optical drives. Zip drives were optional on all models. These models also introduced Apple's proprietary Apple Display Connector video port.

Digital Audio/Quicksilver[edit]

A new line with a revamped motherboard but retaining the familiar 'Graphite' case debuted on January 9, 2001. Known officially as the Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio), it is in effect a Quicksilver design inside the Graphite enclosure. Motorola had added a seventh pipeline stage in the new PowerPC G4 design to achieve faster clock frequencies. New features included a fourth PCI slot, a 133 MHz system bus, an improved 4X AGP slot, and a new 'digital audio' Tripath Class T amplifier sound system. The models were offered in 466 MHz, 533 MHz, dual 533 MHz, 667 MHz and 733 MHz configurations, the latter two using a newer PowerPC 7450 processor. The number of RAM slots was reduced to three, accommodating up to 1.5 Gigabytes of PC133SDRAM.

The 733 MHz model was the first Macintosh to include a built-in DVD-R or Apple-branded SuperDrive, the rest of the line became the first Macs to ship with CD-RW drives. This was also the first series of Macs to include an Nvidia graphics card, the GeForce 2MX.

At Macworld ExpoNew York on July 18, 2001, a new line debuted featuring a cosmetically redesigned case known as Quicksilver, and various upgrades to the specifications. It was available in 733 MHz, 867 MHz and dual 800 MHz configurations. The 733 MHz model was notable for not having a level three cache. The SuperDrive was offered on the mid-range 867 MHz model, and UltraATA/100 hard drives were offered on all models. The internal speaker received an upgrade, using a Harman/Kardon speaker.

The Quicksilver line received criticism in MacWorld's review for removing the 'eject' button and the manual eject pinhole, as well as the pass-through monitor power plug, and for the base specification of 128 MB RAM as being insufficient for running Mac OS X.^[6]

Updated Quicksilver machines, officially named Power Mac G4 (QuickSilver 2002), were introduced on January 28, 2002, with 800 MHz, 933 MHz and dual 1 GHz configurations. This was the first Mac to reach 1 GHz. Again, the low-end 800 MHz model did not include any level three cache. The graphics in this series were provided by an Nvidia GeForce4 MX400 card. Some of these models have ATA controllers with 48-bit LBA to accommodate hard drives larger than 128 GB.

Mirrored Drive Doors/FW800[edit]

Another generation of Apple Power Mac G4s, officially named 'Mirrored Drive Doors' (MDD), was introduced on August 13, 2002, featuring both a new Xserve-derived DDR motherboard architecture and a new case design. All models were available in dual processor configurations running at 867 MHz, 1 GHz or 1.25 GHz. As with the Xserves, the PowerPC 7455 CPU used does not have a DDR frontside bus, meaning the CPU of the 133MHz frontside bus models could use at most only 50% of the new system's theoretical memory bandwidth, providing no improvement over previous models. The rest was available to the graphics card and I/O systems. A single processor 1.25 GHz model would be the last Power Mac G4 the company offered to the public after the announcement of the new Power Mac G5, introduced in June 2003.

The last real update to the Power Mac G4 line came on January 28, 2003, offering dual 1.42 GHz PowerPC 7455 processors, with features not seen in previous DDR models: a built-in FireWire 800 connector, optional integrated Bluetooth, and optional integrated AirPort Extreme. These were also the first Power Macs that could not boot into Mac OS 9.

With the launch of the Power Mac G5 on June 23, 2003, Apple re-introduced the August 2002 Power Mac G4 because of perceived demand for Mac OS 9 machines. Between that, its low price-tag, and the delayed availability of Power Mac G5s, it proved a strong seller, albeit for a relatively short time. Production stopped on June 27, 2004, and the remaining inventory was liquidated, its discontinuation ending the 20-year legacy of Classic Mac OS support.

Timeline of Power Macintosh models

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

1. ^'Apple Unveils 'Personal Supercomputer''. SFGate.
2. ^'Apple steps up to G4 Macs'. ZDNet.
3. ^'The 400 MHz PowerMac Reviewed'. The Mac Observer. February 21, 2000. Retrieved October 19, 2008.
4. ^'The Apple Power Macintosh G4 400MHz PCI'. Forevermac.com. Retrieved November 30, 2011.
5. ^'Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) - Technical Specifications'.
6. ^'Hands on with the Power Mac G4/867'. MacWorld. August 25, 2001.