What is your favorite PPC MAc

I would have to say that my favorite PPC Mac was the Powermac 6500. I have yet to own one for myself but I always found them quite interesting. Neat case design, fast chip for their time (first Mac or PC to hit 300MHz I've heard), and a built-in subwoofer. They did have a pretty low RAM ceiling, though.

My favorite Mac clone was the Daystar Millenium. Mmmmm, quad 604s.

... the key lime clamshell ibook. there is no computer more unique. it is a great backup for my macbook.

Beige G3 AIO often called ugly but I like it and makes a great OS 9 machine. My next would be the MDD I think the best looking PPC and with dual CPU still very usable.

although the key lime ibook is my favorite, the AIO is very cool. i recently purchased several of these, they were only made for 6 months and only sold to schools. they are very cool machines, but quite unwieldy, and they need a keyboard as a power button. other than that, i love the expandability of a tower in the all-in-one form factor

6100: slimline, unobtrusive form factor, and can take up to a 500MHz G3 and 264MB of RAM

The iMac G4. It looks so unorthodox for a computer but at the same time, is clean and elegant. I need to get one...

I don't have a favorite.
I like all of my PPC's.

i always wanted one of the 9600 dual cpus... when i was young, reading the macconnection and other magazines i used to beg my parents for one.

Tho' my old 800 Titanium is getting to feel kinda slow lately.

I must admit I have a very soft spot in my heart for my PPC PB540C. 167Mhz of blazing PPC603 power! Not to mention my 66MHz PPC Color Classic. Oooh, and my grayscale Duo 2300, too bad the KBs just plain suck on those things, otherwise I bet I'd still use it once in awhile.

First PPC was a 7100, still got it somewhere. Bit fond of that one too.

dan k

I just sold one that I'm now wishing I hadn't--the iMac G3 SE 600mhz graphite. Without a doubt, the most beautiful PPC Apple ever made. With that sleek clear graphite case, it's just a gorgeous looking machine. The one I sold had no yellowing in the white plastic parts of the case. Well, maybe I can pick up one of the 700mhz models without yellowing. The epitome of a line. Apple finally got the CRT iMacs right with those models.

The 6500 was another good contender, and of course, the 9600. Both were very fun machines to own.

6100: slimline, unobtrusive form factor, and can take up to a 500MHz G3 and 264MB of RAM

I'm in agreement here. The 6100 was my first PPC Mac, and I used it for so long...way past the use by date. Up until the point when I got a MBP. In fact I think it was my only PPC machine. I had a Powerbook 1400...don't remember if that was PPC or not.
I still have it, somewhere, for 20 years down the road when I want to pull it out...

Yes, those were great machines. I've still got a single-processor unit with a G3 upgrade card in it; not sure why, but it still feels snappier, more responsive, than some of my newer hardware. Maybe that it fits OS 9 better than some of the newer hardware fits OS X.

Twentieth Anniversary Mac
an artistic beauty

My beloved original 400Mhz G3 with no upgrades, just 1 Gb of RAM and 80 Gb, HD. I am still getting 8 hours from its 2 batteries, still everyday use with 10.4 or Linux, I even use Photoshop 7 or iMovie on it sometimes. Good machines age well, and this one ages better than any other... Apple doesn't build boxes like this anymore... ...well, nobody does...

I started running 10.2 on it, then bought 10.3 and then 10.4, which is slower than 10.3 but I required for some critical sw I need to use.

The last 20" iMac G4 is high on my list. The clamshell iBook is worth a mention being the first notebook with Airport I believe. I quite like the Classic II personally as my favorite compact Mac. And the Beige G3 tower I like as it's a great crossover machine can have all the old ports, all the new.

20" iMac G4 I think.

Actually, the 1.5Ghz PPC 12" Powerbook. That's my favorite. Wish I'd kept mine.

17" iMac G4 (USB 2.0 version) is my all-around favorite because of its combination of design, functionality, and performance. (The 20" is undeniably cool of course, but I like the relative compactness of the 17" and I like the way the screen size proportion relates to the size of the base.)

I recently got my first G3 AIO, and I must admit it's an incredibly handy machine, having floppy, ZIP and optical drives built in, plus upgradable CPU, 3 PCI slots, and OS 8/9/X capability. Great as a "translator" machine between old and new.

And finally, the Power Mac 7300/7600 are terrific because they're so ridiculously upgradable and easy to work on.

Actually, the 1.5Ghz PPC 12" Powerbook. That's my favorite. Wish I'd kept mine.

Me too.

My favorite of all time is probably the PowerBook 3400 though (also wish I had kept that one), but that could change if only someone would sell/give me a PB 2400 (hint, hint).

Oh crap, of course - the PB2400c! I owned one and it was fantastic.

http://lowendmac.com/pb2/12in-powerbook-g4-1.5-ghz.html

I Have to say This is a hard question to answer, but for Favorite power pc laptop the wallstreet g3 hands down for it's easy of repair and upgrade capability (I once placed 512mb ram in on :). If you asked what my pick for desktop was I would tell you the Power Mac G5 DP Model for the power and looks this computer brings to the table.

Favorite PPC Portable would have to be the G3 series of PowerBooks. I rally miss my Lombard.

Favorite PPC Desktop would probably be the MDD G4. Mine serves me quite well every day.

9600/350 or a Radius 81/110 depending if I am in the mood for PCI or Nubus.

I'd have to say my MDD 1.25 GHz. All the benefits of still booting OS 9, plus powerful enough for modern apps.

But there's always a sweet spot left in my heart for my first PPC Mac, the 6100/60 AV.

I'd have to say my MDD 1.25 GHz. All the benefits of still booting OS 9, plus powerful enough for modern apps.

Agreed. My Dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 tri-boots OS 9, OS X (leopard) and Linux (Ubuntu 9)

I would have to say that my favorite PPC Mac was the Powermac 6500. I have yet to own one for myself but I always found them quite interesting. Neat case design, fast chip for their time (first Mac or PC to hit 300MHz I've heard), and a built-in subwoofer. They did have a pretty low RAM ceiling, though.

My favorite Mac clone was the Daystar Millenium. Mmmmm, quad 604s.

I had a 6500/250 for quite a few years and loved it. It was probably one of the best bang for the buck pre-G3s that came out. Eventually my motherboard gave out and I upgraded it with a 6500/300. Its main achilles heel was the upgrade path and memory ceiling making it pretty much impossible to run OSX. Still it is a really good machine for running older software.

I'd have to say that my favorite PPC Mac is my PowerMac 9600. It became my main colocated server in about 2000-2001, and has gone from a 300 MHz 604ev with 512 megs of memory and 72 gigs of SCSI storage to a 1 GHz G4 (Sonnet with 256k L2 and 2 meg L3), 1.5 gigs of memory, 1 terabyte of hardware mirrored SCSI storage on an 80 MB/sec bus and gigabit ethernet. It was completely overengineered for its day, and still handles quite a load now, all while being incredibly stable with NetBSD.

Another favorite is a Motorola Starmax 3000 which I found in the trash in NYC around 2000 and is now an NTP stratum 1 time server, a BIND server, and router.

Finally, one of my machines has a Performa 6360 or 6400 motherboard, also found in the trash in NYC, with a comm slot ethernet and PCI gigabit ethernet which I've built into a Quadra 630 case by adding a 3.3 volt regulator. It's a NAT and IPv6 router, and has been up for more than two years now without problems. It lives in a plastic box under the house it serves.

I think I like these machines because of their stability - you build it and forget about it.

Well, the 8600 was just amazingly upgradable. Good little video machine before my G4 series Macs.

Then there is the 12" G4 Aluminum Powerbook. Wow. Still use that.

And the Duo 2300 and the Duo series Macs. I was tempted to get those up and running again due to the coolness factor. We shall see.

Shame the Newtons are RISC processor machines or I'd mention them too.

I'm still using my TiPowerbook 500. I put in a much bigger and faster drive, and that makes it sail on startup! I love the fact that I can start up the closed machine with an external iMac keyboard. Today on the MacUser site, someone was griping about this new closed MacBookPro desktop holder because the on/off switch was inaccessible and I thought about the TiPowerbook.

Also, I like having the dual boot option (into OS 9) as it seems to be the only way to recogize CF cards formatted to Apple II ProDOS.

Mutant Pie

I've always had an affinity to the the Macintosh IIvx form factor. Seeing that case evolve into the PowerMac 7000 series and eventually the beige G3 was pretty neat. It was just sexy in my opinion. Weird.

I'm also a fan of the PoweMac 6100 form factor. The only thing I didn't like about it was Apple's proprietary video out port. But they were/are good at doing stuff like that.

I'd still like to get a 6100 and put a G3 or G4 board in it.

Interesting! Did they make G3 and G4 upgrades for the 6100?

Interesting! Did they make G3 and G4 upgrades for the 6100?

They did make G3 upgrades. Never heard of a G4 upgrade. Not much point to a G4 in a machine that can't boot OSX.

Heh, my dad used a 6100 for years and years as his main business machine (up until about 2 years ago where I replaced it with a B&W running os 9 and a scsi card so he could access the 6100's HD, and then a lampshade imac to finally get him into os x this summer). The PSU in his 6100 died and took out the monitor we had with that connector. Got another spare 6100 but gave up with it. That was our first mac, and also the last PPC machine we were still using regularly, it lasted well over 10 years and the only thing that failed in that time was the original harddrive around 1998, replacement scsi HD is still going!

Of the computers I own my favorite ppc machines are:

Desktops:
-Dual 2.5 G5 due to the interior case design and water cooling. Still keep it under my desk headless as its my favorite looking machine, although a bit too loud to keep running in my room at night. I have it setup with screen sharing so I can keep all my music on it and play it through itunes sharing. Still a powerful machine today, although unfortunately completely obsolete as it can't run any new software.
-dual 533 digital audio g4 as it was my first dual processor machine (got it free with a bad psu, was the most powerful machine I had ever owned!)
-7300/7350 workgroup server (had the wgs version but without any of the software so was basically the non wgs version), just because of the ease of use and how nicely designed and laid out the internals were. I mean it even has a kickstand for the foldout drivebay assembly!

Laptops:
-powerbook G3 (have a stack of wallstreets, would have loved the lombard or pismo)- these were awesome looking machines in their day and had so much versatility. 2 batteries for 10+ hours of battery life even today, or zip drives/super drive/cd drive etc. And the way you could pop out the keyboard to access the HD carrier or processor card!

Honorable mention:
-lampshade iMac. My gf recently found one in a closet at her job and brought it home for me, a machine I had wanted for years (she didn't even know, just figured I'd want another mac). Cool machine but a pain to work on and the fragile monitor arm always gets messed up (the one on mine causes the screen to sit crooked and theres no way to fix it aside from replacing the entire arm)

I also like the G5 imac design, however ours has the issue with vertical lines in the screen, and is disappointingly slow with a 1.9ghz g5 and 2 gb of ram (bought it for the family when my sister was in highschool as she did music and the software only supported PPC machines and not the new intel machines that were coming out, and this was the fastest AIO at the time that met those requirements, and we got a great deal on an open box return). Its probably been the most problematic ppc machine we had ever purchased.

I really miss that good internal design on old mac desktops and even laptops, you can't even open up a new machine!

Also of machines I don't own, I always loved the quicksilver model G4 towers. IMO it was the coolest looking pre-g5 tower they had made (I thought the mdd was horribly ugly)

Well, the 8600 was just amazingly upgradable. Good little video machine before my G4 series Macs.

Then there is the 12" G4 Aluminum Powerbook. Wow. Still use that.

And the Duo 2300 and the Duo series Macs. I was tempted to get those up and running again due to the coolness factor. We shall see.

Shame the Newtons are RISC processor machines or I'd mention them too.

Weren't the duo's 68k?

I still love my duo (230?) and duo dock that I have sitting around, such a cool idea although I'll never have a use for it (but its one of the machines in my collection I would never part with!)

Fav laptop:
Powerbook g4 1.5ghz 12"
G3 pismo

Use it everyday. I loooove the keyboard and trackpad on that. Its almost soft. And its perfect sized for normal use!

Fav desktops:
Powermac g5 quad core 2.5ghz... really powerful.

I had a 9600/200MP - what a beast! King of the Hill, only bettered by the IIfx (which cost about the same, just in 1980s rather than 1990s dollars).

It replaced my 8500/120 (upgraded to 200MHz... this was the first Mac I owned myself) as my daily production machine for home graphic design freelancing. A far cry from the PowerMac G4s I'd been previously using but it still rocked, and earned me a living too. As awesome as the dual processors were, they weren't terribly useful in anything outside of Photoshop (one of the few apps that used both chips, provided you installed the right extension or plugin) so I upgraded to a Sonnet G4/350 card and put in a Rage 128 16Mb video card alongside the stock TwinTurbo 4Mb card. That allowed me to use Sonnet X Enabler and try OS X 10.2 for the first time. It was pretty slow under OSX but I persisted for about 3 years with it until I got my Powerbook G4 12".

By the time I sold it, she had about 600Mb of RAM installed (128Mb DIMMs were soooo expensive back then), USB card, FW card, no less than 4 SCSI HDs, 3 of which mounted vertically in some foam and soft-RAIDed into pairs to get some useable volumes. Was a rather precarious system - would take about 10 mins to boot up with a huge amount of kernel errors going on in Verbose mode. One time I was having problems mounting my drives and took it in to the local AppleCentre... the reaction was half laughter, half WTF! They got it going again though!

Probably the most amazing thing was that when it came time to sell, I put the 200MP processor card back in, sold off the G4 processor card separately along with the FW card, kept 3 out of the 4 hard drives for myself and lost only about 10-15% of what I'd put $ wise into the system over the 4 years of ownership. Not bad at all!

I have a soft spot for the 8500 too... you always remember your first especially when she's unloved by everyone else. By golly that case sucked!

Cheers, Ben.

Mine one still in use is the Powermac Performa 6205/CD just won't die lol

DrBunsen wrote: 6100: slimline, unobtrusive form factor, and can take up to a 500MHz G3 and 264MB of RAM

Is it possible to use a g3-acc in a PM6100 and also using a quickdraw (3D) Acc-Card (NUBUS or PDS) via Adapter?

Surprisingly I have three of them...  A Strawberry toilet bowl iMac, a newer Blueberry toilet bowl iMac and one of the Bronze laptops.  But I've never really been a huge fan of any of them.  I've got several 68k Macs...  II, IIfx and a recently retrieved from my parent's basement Classic II.  I have actually been thinking of selling most of them since my interests are mostly with Apple II stuff these days.

The eMac has always been a favorite of mine. I've used a good amount of them in elementary school, and bought one when I started middle school which got me into macs. I was given a few more of them down the line and I've found the later models to be piss easy to overclock well; I got a 1.42GHz model up to 1.92GHz, and a 1.25GHz model with the later 7447B processor up to 1.67GHz. The CRTs also look great, and they're a perfected design of what went wrong with the slot loading G3 models and the problematic fanless operation those went with. Sure, you'd really need to get in top physical shape to lift one of them, but I've worked on so many to a point where I'm okay with it. The first 3 models (USB2 works with a few tricks) run very well on Mac OS 9.2.2, and make great OS 9 systems. You'll still be able to find quite a good selection of them for a good price, however shipping is always going to be expensive because of how much they weigh.

So far I haven't found a PPC Macintosh that I don't like, due to my fondness for MacOS 9.x and, in particular, OS X 10.4 and 10.5.  The hardware have all been relatively easy to work on - I have a 7100/120, a 7600/132, a beige G3/266, a Cube, a G4 MDD (on which I'm composing this), a couple of Pismos, a 1GHz iMac lamp and a bunch of G4 PowerBooks. I collected these mostly some years ago after being gifted with a 1.5GHz 17" PowerBook nearly 10 years ago and fell in love with OS X - I had owned/worked on UNIX-based workstations since 1992, and bought my first NeXT cube in 2001 so jumping into the NeXT/Apple merger was very enjoyable. And these all make a nice bridge to on-line resources, being networked in with my collection of old workstations (NeXT, Sun, Silicon Graphics), via 10B-2 and 10B-T...

I still use my PPC's as my daily drivers as much as possible - I left IT jobs years back and can now enjoy the field as my hobby. I look forward to trying out AppleFritter's eWorld reboot ASAP...