Is a £10 Mac Mini Worth It? - Mac Mini G4 in 2020

[@bramvandenbroeck5060]

I bought a PowerBook G4 1,33Ghz model which didn't boot, had a nasty dent in it and had piss poor wifi reception, costed me ont 20 euro's, i replaced the airport card, replaced the hard drive with a 120gb one, i replaced the dead dvd drive with a dual layer superdrive, i dented out the case (which was a great succes actually!), reconnected the loose airport antenna on the inside of the laptop (a known issue on those machines) and i cleaned up this laptop as good as i could, and now? Its a sexy machine, ready to run all the software i have from back in the days, my dad had a huge software library that i inherited! So now i use it actually on a daily basis, its the exact same machine that my dad had back in 2004, its an amazing piece of history, the only bummer is that the upper memory slot doesn't seem to work, i am gonna take out the mobo and reflow it with a rework station so that i can upgrade this machine from 1gb to 2gb of ram. Great video man, i like those old powerpc macs, they have still a lot of potential and they will go up in value in a couple of years!

[@AlguienMas]

How did the reflow go? I'm curious

[@bramvandenbroeck5060]

@@AlguienMas It did help, the powerbook recognized the memory module (where before id didn't see anything at all), but would randomly freeze, i think i am gonna buy 2 new ddr sticks and try those, something isn't right with one of the ram sticks i think, because its mis-behaving in another laptop which is a pentium m.

[@AlguienMas]

@@bramvandenbroeck5060 Alright,cool

[@lcaise]

daily use? What You mean ? :D

[@georgesenda1952]

I am using my 2006 Mac Mini to play basic Diablo 2 on it. I think I need to get a better CD/DVD drive and want to put a larger hard drive on it and I do not know how to allow it to get on the net but Diablo 2 and other games work fine. I may upgrade the os but older games may no longer work. I subscribed. What Sony monitor are you using in this video ? I would like to get one. Thanks for posting the video.

[@ScienceAlliance]

This is awesome. Another channel like Budget Builds and RandomGamingHD

[@dwd9820]

We just found a nice 2005 Mac Mini G4 1,42 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 80GB HDD, with all original parts at our dump free store. It turns on, and it works fine for a while but then starts to drag, freeze, etc. Had Tiger, but we had only a Leopard install disc. Put on Leopard and it ran as new for a day until I tried out Time Machine. Have ordered a new 1GB stick of RAM and a new 7,200 RPM HDD. If these do not help will look at the thermal paste on the heat sink. Thanks for the video. Also...What is the name of the song playing at about the 4:30 mark? Thanks! UPDATE: A new stick of 1GB of RAM, a new Ultra ATA 7,200 RPM HDD, and a fresh install of Tiger 10.4.11 and the G4 is running as new. All for about $60 CAD investment. We even found a nice 24" monitor and a new wired keyboard at the same dump free store for it.

[@a4e69636b]

What do you do on this computer?

[@dwd9820]

@@a4e69636b Put it away in a box and it has not been used since. I use my 2012 Mac Mini Server i7, 16GB RAM, and dual 1TB SSD/HDD daily. High Sierra on it. I also have many other Mac's so the 2005 G4 Mini just sits.

[@Protoking]

@@dwd9820that’s too bad I had a G4 1.42 still do actually but I used to use this app I forget what it was called but it stopped working for what I’d use it for and that was streaming KZbin vids if you knew the link to paste into it. I believe it was a 3 letter app but development stopped in an no longer working state. In this app 480p vids could be streamed smoothly

[@Protoking]

The G4s can be fun if you want to use it for a task and the apps you can find barely don’t run well enough and then you search for a version that maybe uses the altivec extensions and then that app works with good perf.

[@nathanaelhood7699]

I have a 2005 Mac mini G4, love it so much, it really is a bundle of joy! Problem though, I paid $50 for it (￡38.19), but I got the original box, no manuals, and the power cable, and the DVI to VGA adapter. It also came with several emulators featuring tons of original Nintendo games, Sega games, gameboy advance games. Also came with photoshop CS2 from 2004, and Microsoft Office 2004. Hate it when people call PowerPC Macs crap 'cause they really aren't. I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but the silver iPhone 5, 5S, and SE match this Mac EXACTLY. It's weird when you think about it... By the way, had no idea you had a Ka!! Wish we had those little bundles of joy (of course along with the SreetKA and the Puma) across the pond, but we don't.

[@theshadowman1398]

I had one of those recently. I got an IDE SSD enclosure + an M-sata 32 gig module applies new thermal paste and that thing was flying ( sort of ). I also added a wifi module. I played KZbin videos on tenfourfox on this machine. It did need to drop the resolution of the video quite a lot, but it did work.

[@alexandrossotiropoulos5621]

Very good channel! I bought one today for 40 dollars to use it with virtualpc and emulate win 98 and other old windows more natively than building a pc from that era.

[@joshuajohnson3296]

That smile @ 2:44 ...when a Mac boots to life...priceless

[@outtheredude]

A friend gave me a PowerMac G4 Quicksilver a few months back. It's a bit older than your G4 Mini, so it can not only run Tiger, but also classic Mac OS9 in a dual boot configuration for Macintosh 68K goodness.

[@pitliang4964]

how to build network NAS base on MAC mini G4

[@a4e69636b]

You are totally right about PowerPC. As much as I loved it back in the day you just can't watch a KZbin video very easily on one. My 2 Ghz G5 iMac could only play 360p video using TenFourFox. Thank you for this video.

[@Teri_Berk]

Actually, the reason for KZbin videos not being played easily is related to shitty HTML5 compression. KZbin used Flash Player back in 2005 and FP videos would play easily on any machine.

[@codykamminga9667]

10 pounds gets you a powerfilter for a Ford Ka

[@patrickpowell5430]

Coincidentally, I've just installed a 128Gb SSD (with and IDE/PATA connector so needed and adaptor) and desptite the comparatively slow G4 could be used daily no bother. The one drawback is that the OS I'm running, Tiger, means that it is crap surfing the net and stuff like iMessage or whatever it is called doesn't work. But as I did it all just for the hell of it, well, what the hell.

[@guitarromano]

use car polish wax to remove the writing on the case

[@NomadicDmitry]

The CD drive is shot on my iMac G4 as well :( And Leopard is not supported on some G4s (earlier models). But Tiger was a great system that I actually liked a lot.

[@sircampbelltenson7297]

Got a shuttle xpc with an athlon xp for a quid a while back, got it set up with linux mint as a little music recording box and it works lovely

[@andrewuknown494]

Really nice video

[@manueljesus3147]

Thanks to great videos like this good luck finding one under $100 USD with a power supply.

[@hartoz]

Actually your better off installing OS9, the Mac Mini was one of the last computers to support OS 9 (along with the eMac), and running the old OS, they ran really quickly allowing you to run all those retro Mac games. OSX never really ran well on the Mac Mini, and finding apps that run on Tiger is a pain.

[@virtualtools_3021]

It doesn't officially support it, it's only thanks to the work of macos9lives that made a custom iso

[@egbront1506]

The actual hardware is more than decent enough to run 10.4 and even 10.5. The annoying sticking point is the max 1GB of RAM, which hits multitasking. Had Apple settled on SODIMMs rather than desktop RAM we could have doubled that to the G4s limit of 2GB but I suppose laptop RAM was much more expensive then and this was meant to be the budget entry into Apple computers. Apple saw sense with the next Mac Mini which took two SODIMMs instead.

[@IgorGiganskiANtiatom]

Make a video running Linux on it

[@phatcyclist]

An Early 2005 1.25ghz Mac Mini is the only Apple computer I've ever bought new, and it was a great little machine. Even though it was very inexpensive it was more capable than people would imagine. I played the original release of World of Warcraft on it quite a bit, at 1600x1200 even. I ran a webserver on it too, and it was really a pretty good daily computer until the Intel switch happened, and software support fell completely off. The 1GB memory upgrade was a necessity. If you had a lot of Classic applications and you wanted one of the newest computers to run it, this would be a good one, but aside from that it's a really limited platform for daily computing all these years later. OSX is pretty slick with how easy it is to run FTP and webserver tasks on it though, this computer could do some of that. It's also one of the latest Apple computers to include a modem, so for the few people out there than need that connectivity it may be useful even as a connection bridge for a more modern machine.

[@balorduomo]

Try MorphOS on that machine. It'll make it fly

[@another3997]

Whilst I liked the Amiga OS of old, and so called 'nextgen' Amiga like OSs are amazing feats of programming, MorphOS costs several times the price of this whole computer! There aren't really that many applications available for MorphOS, it's underlying architecture is based on a 1980's Amiga OS model, and it's nowhere near as secure as even OS 10.4. So, unless you only want to mess around, either OS X or a lightweight PPC Linux distribution would be a better fit.

[@theeggman4806]

But that £10 mac is pretty much a pebble now in 2020 a couple of years after launch it was getting to the extinction point...gonna have to dissagree a shelf decoration thats it..Also the 1sec music stabs are v annoying and pointless...

[@another3997]

Does a G4 Mac Mini run contemporary software any slower now than it did when it was new? No. With a couple of really cheap upgrades, it may actually run them faster. Nobody is going to use vintage hardware to do sensitive or time critical work these days. If the G4 runs the old software you want it to run, then it isn't a shelf ornament. Everyone has modern hardware to do modern stuff. Old computers are a hobby and don't have to have great performance.

[@danhuby]

I'd think it'd be better to install Linux and have a supported modern OS rather than running Tiger for which support was dropped years ago - running that is a major security risk.

[@virtualtools_3021]

Safetyism is a cancer on society

[@another3997]

If you're running anything that old, the chances of you using it for anything serious on the internet are virtually nil. Treat internet access as a gimmick, don't store any personal data on the machine, and limit network access to just a secure FTP connection to move files to it (which will already have plenty of security). Even better, just use USB thumb drives to move files. Problem solved.

[@henntendo]

You can, with LeopardRebirth & Office 2008 make a “decent” office PC, with a modern style, iMove from iLife ‘09 works, but is slow. I don’t own one, but I’ve tested it on the iBook G4 and even iMac G5 of the time.

[@Doctorj1]

I use my PPC Macs for any and all word processing, slideshows and such. iWork '09 is fantastic and Tiger runs extremely well. I've got a dual boot of both Leopard and Tiger on most so I get the best of both worlds. My Powermac G5 dual 2GHz also works great for editing videos and using Photoshop CS3; it's incredible how useful and usable these machines still are

[@nathanaelhood7699]

@@Doctorj1 I have a 2005 with photoshop CS2!

[@lcaise]

@@Doctorj1 editing videos? 480p ?

[@Doctorj1]

@@lcaise I've been able to edit 1080p full hd without many issues on that g5 (although I wouldn't recommend that. 720p and lower is more reasonable)

[@samsonsanthosh]

Still great video man I love your green ham gaming style I miss the guy

[@itzyaboyyruben3378]

Damn this guy needs more viewers

[@ScienceAlliance]

^

[@samsonsanthosh]

I'm not gonna lie macs in the past were mesmerizing it still is Except the price tag could lead you to your grave and heavy debt

[@mattblatchley2061]

if you find one of those for 10 pounds today, buy it and resell it for 10x that

[@mattblatchley2061]

G4 Apple silicone...WILL BE in demand... I buy any good deals on G4s that I can find... (1st gen intel's too of course)

[@mattblatchley2061]

great video!

[@KING_ARTHUR_EXCALIBUR]

Pornhub displays really good on Safari running Tiger👍

[@jinxterx]

"why I'm really appealed into the Mac Mini." Did you skip english classes at school or something?

[@iamnerow3034]

Family Guy Season 11 is not high quality

[@Techwen]

You’re just salty because you can’t boot your broken Macintosh

[@oylededemeseydin8320]

So you didn't show us anything besides run a video of it. What can this pc does? Crap.

[@Techwen]

Have made various videos on the PowerPC platform in the past which are not “crap” if you’re really interested

[@Doctorj1]

Mate don't diss the PPC. These Macs are great!

[@another3997]

Nearly as crap as your comment. Old computers will run their old software just as well as they did when new. It's what vintage computing is all about. What do you expect a 17 year old computer to do?

[@NoNamenoonehere]

10pounds gets me a kebab with the works where I live

[@WarthogGBWI]

Great machines. Toss Linux on it if you want current web browsers and youtube ability. Here's a bad quality video of my 1.5ghz mini : kzbin.info/www/bejne/h3TMfJ6ojr-ZbrM

[@osnapitzsamd]

You guys: you can buy a Mac Mini with Intel Core Duo for less and run newer versions of Mac OS X better: unless you want the G4 processor to experience the PowerPC architecture, you shouldn't buy one of these.