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Seriously. An old iMac of the DV series is perfect for this, except maybe for the footprint, it's bigger than a mini-ITX BSD box. Fanless so it's very silent, low power requirement, runs MacOS X or Linux or BSD. Just set it to disable the screen after one minute of inactivity for even lower power needs.

Plus it doubles as an MP3 jukebox (the Harman Kardon speakers are better than their looks would lead one to think), and with a eyeTV plugged on the FireWire, it can also replace a Tivo. You can get one cheap on Ebay or through LowEndMac.

The original iMac was $1299.

Actually, they released it in 1997 at $7499.

20th Anniversary Mac.

One word: MacTV. I don't think it sold well. A black iMac would be cool though. Or possibly hot. Still, it would be handy for dorm rooms where space is at a serious premium. Aside from that, there is this aftermarket item that may help.

Really, they have taken a laptop, removed the keyboard and touch pad and given it a stand.

When you think of it this way, one really does have to ask the questions, "Why the hell hasn't this been done to death already?". :P

Others have mentioned the MacQuarium, but let us not forget the original computer recycling hack - the VAXbar!

Is this the first time that Apple is licensing their design/technology to another company to produce clones?

No.

The original, classic broken computer mod is probably still the best place to keep your purple octopus. Various references are available.

If The Steve really objects to having a new iMac integrated into the monitor panel, it's not for technical reasons. The Twentieth Anniversary Mac was a computer integrated into a flat-panel monitor, complete with a vertical CD drive, and they made that way back in 1997! (that large box next to the TAM in that picture is just a subwoofer, the CD-ROM is right below the screen)

Mac Portable

For those not in the know, the Mac Portable was Apple's first portable Mac. It had about 8 hours of battery life, a full size real keyboard, a full size trackball, a 3.5" hard drive with desktop performance, and a whole slew of I/O ports on the back--but it weighed almost 20 lbs!!!

http://lowendmac.com/pb/portable.shtml

(This was a few years before the Sony-designed/built Apple PowerBook 100 and Apple-designed/built PowerBooks 140 and 170)

I'd rather have a T-series ThinkPad over an X-series. The T-series are the heirs to the 600 series (I currently have a 400MHz 600e) and weigh about five pounds. You can get one with Centrino Inside or Pentium-M with a different wireless chipset. (hint: the Cisco wireless is currently the most Linux friendly of the three available for this machine.)

Actually ThinkPads and PowerBooks/iBooks compare pretty favorably to one another. Both are built to last. The choice between IBM and Apple is more a question of which platform you prefer rather than quality.

BTW both IBM and Apple have had battery problems in the past. The 600 series battery is notorious for losing capacity, and the PB 5300 might have caught fire a few times thanks to a flaw in its LiIon battery.

This time it's not supposed to burst into flames, just overheat.

If Apple is solely supported (which I know you did not claim) by people unwilling to change their stance, and not in any way by the products they sell, then Apple should literally be able to package dog dookie in a box and sell it.

Funny you should mention that...

If Apple is solely supported (which I know you did not claim) by people unwilling to change their stance, and not in any way by the products they sell, then Apple should literally be able to package dog dookie in a box and sell it.

Funny you should mention that...

Some time ago, Microsoft purchased a company called SoftImage. Turned out to be a good investment in 3D development and film compositing with a product called the DS.

Meanwhile, in Tewksbury, the Avid Media Composer which ran only on the Apple Macintosh platform was ported to Windows when Microsoft made some investments in Avid. About that time Apple (unwisely) discontinued their six PCI-Slot Macintosh..

When Avid noted that their product was dead-ended because its code basis assumed a raster that was limited to NTSC and PAL television format, they purchased SoftImage's DS in order to be able to easily produce software that will do film and high definition video.

Microsoft doesn't make investments for nothing. I believe I can do something very close to what Microsoft is doing for Mini-DV video on any format of video or film with the Avid DS -- though for a lot more money (something like $120K USD). I would not be surprised if they got the technology from that very old investment.

As a creative person though, I have to say I don't like the fact that the DS-Nitris will probably never run on a Macintosh. We have problems with ours that are related mostly to two issues: Operator screw-ups (expected) and Microsoft Windows XP Professional limitations, many of which do not exist in Apple's current versions of Unix.

Licensed it to whom?

The people who wanted to license it.

If no one wanted to license it, then why did Apple try so hard to stop people from cloning their machines?

You didn't read the article, did you?

Yes, I did.

You didn't read the higher posts in this thread, did you?

LK

Bottom line, had Apple wanted to license the OS, there WAS a market for it.

Interesting tidbit: the very first Powerbook was designed by Sony. Nonetheless, they're going to lose this round to the iPod badly.

The problem is that many of those Performas were real Road Apples. At least they weren't as bad as the Centris line, which seemed to combine the high cost of the high end Macs with the crummy design of the low end Macs. Saving 10% of the cost for 40% of the performace is not a good tradeoff.

just like powermac has always been very expensive and headless

The G3 All-In-One basically became the iMac.

The 20th Anniversary Macintosh could also be thought of as a relative of the modern LCD-equipped iMac.

Others to look at would be the Performa/Power Mac 5000 series.

Apple's been making all-in-ones since long before the iMac. The first Macintosh systems were AiO models.

just like powermac has always been very expensive and headless

The G3 All-In-One basically became the iMac.

The 20th Anniversary Macintosh could also be thought of as a relative of the modern LCD-equipped iMac.

Others to look at would be the Performa/Power Mac 5000 series.

Apple's been making all-in-ones since long before the iMac. The first Macintosh systems were AiO models.

Public terminals will never be "all" that a normal computer user needs, simply because of security reasons.

I can check my email at my small home town's libary, but i have helped the staff remove key loggers from those machines.

btw i don't carry a laptop, when my computing (internet) needs expand beyond my house i bring along a portable.

Obviously you've never dealt with an apple 8500. Worst. Case. Design. EVER.

Apple has had a thing with one-piece computers since, oh, about 1984. Even excepting the "classic mac" style, they turned an endless stream of all-in-ones, from the LC 520 to a beige G3 model.

While these might not have been as "sexy" as the iMac, they were subsantially easier to service. They had better cooling than the iMac, and usually more provision for expansion. They used standard Apple parts, not overpriced laptop bits. And they shipped with decent, useful ADB input devices--not rediculous half-keyboards and hockey-puck mice.

The iMac wasn't a good computer, just a stylish one.

Oh, and it's not true that iMacs lacked floppy drives. Every iMac I've ever seen has been tethered to a cheap external floppy drive, and usually a Zip drive as well. What design statement does this sexy one-piece computer make when the surrounding desktop is cluttered with garishly-colored extra drives and tangled USB cords?

Apple has had a thing with one-piece computers since, oh, about 1984. Even excepting the "classic mac" style, they turned an endless stream of all-in-ones, from the LC 520 to a beige G3 model.

While these might not have been as "sexy" as the iMac, they were subsantially easier to service. They had better cooling than the iMac, and usually more provision for expansion. They used standard Apple parts, not overpriced laptop bits. And they shipped with decent, useful ADB input devices--not rediculous half-keyboards and hockey-puck mice.

The iMac wasn't a good computer, just a stylish one.

Oh, and it's not true that iMacs lacked floppy drives. Every iMac I've ever seen has been tethered to a cheap external floppy drive, and usually a Zip drive as well. What design statement does this sexy one-piece computer make when the surrounding desktop is cluttered with garishly-colored extra drives and tangled USB cords?

Some do.

> I've read that the 750 in the iBook used less power than the southbridge, but I don't have references to back that up.

The 750fx consumes about 5.4 Watt @ 800mhz. Which is nice, but the Intel Mobile P3 ULV can go up to 933 mhz on 4 Watt.

Oh, you can get anything you want at Apple's Restaraunt
You can get anything you want at Apple's Restaraunt
Just log right in, it's just to the left
Just a half a inch from the RDF
You can get anything you want at Apple's Restaraunt

Available in the same five colors as the Revision C and Revision D iMacs, the DV is a bit smaller and has more transparent plastics. The new case allows the iMac to air cool (just like the old Volkswagen Beetle), eliminating the need for a cooling fan.

Asus makes laptops with upgradable CPUs. You can even buy them barebones (No CPU/RAM/Harddrive).

Actually, Apple tried that too. Check here for an informative, if slightly outdated (newer upgrades are available since then) list of these upgrades. However, the economics of upgrading is usually doubtful. I was considering one back in the days of my old powerbook 1400 - finally I reckoned that for the price of new battery + USB card + new CPU + more RAM I can just sell my powerbook and buy a brand new iBook... and still have a much better machine. When you want a faster car, it's usually a better idea to sell the old vehicle and buy a new one, rather than go through the mess of tuning. It takes a hobbyist to prefer the second way - with laptops it's similar.

Come again?

Not Open in the least. Just read it for yourself.

LK

You are correct.

A possibility

Boy, the 17" Aluminum Apple Notebooks are heavy enough. I can't imagine what an Aluminum-Lead one would be like.

You can take an estimate from this fine 17-pound Mac Portable. It used a lead battery, so I guess it's safe to call it Plastic-Lead. Although it was often called Marketing-Disaster.

Since the Classic wasn't introduced until around 1990, it couldn't have been. However, according to this, it was a Mac Plus

Right idea, wrong model [pedant mode = off]

None of the Macintosh apps I use have 'save' in the toolbar. For file saving, you can either do file:save, or you can do cmd-S. The only app I can think of which might have a save icon in its toolbar is Acrobat Reader, which IIRC is a 3.5" floppy which hasn't been pertinent on the Mac since 1998.

Been there, done that. Anyone remember the Macintosh Portable? 16 lbs of pure love, baby.

Once again, Apple is ahead of their time!!!

Back to the future here - I remember all the criticism of the Macintosh Portable back in 1989 when it came out. "16 pounds!" was the cry. But what it had was the first active matrix LCD and a big honkin' lead-acid battery that would run forever (for the time).

Of course, I think Apple sold like ten of them.

It's kind of funny that it's taken 15 years to get back to the 16-pound laptop again. Go figure. You knew this was coming, though, when Apple and all the Wintel companies started going to 17" screens. Someone was bound to try it.

16 pounds? Man I would much rather tote around a 6.9 pound Apple 17in Powerbook

If you are an Apple fan, consider Macintosh portable. It was also a 16-pounder and it had similar design principle - a "no compromise" replacement for the desktop Mac. To achieve this goal in 1989, the machine required a car-like lead-acid battery, responsible for much of the weight. Obviously, it was a marketing disaster and the company did not repeat the same mistake designing the first powerbook two years later. When discussing portable items, size does matter - and it's usually the smaller the greater...

16 pounds? Man I would much rather tote around a 6.9 pound Apple 17in Powerbook

If you are an Apple fan, consider Macintosh portable. It was also a 16-pounder and it had similar design principle - a "no compromise" replacement for the desktop Mac. To achieve this goal in 1989, the machine required a car-like lead-acid battery, responsible for much of the weight. Obviously, it was a marketing disaster and the company did not repeat the same mistake designing the first powerbook two years later. When discussing portable items, size does matter - and it's usually the smaller the greater...

(This was also posted on my weblog, so my apologies for babbling about things most /.'ers would already know...)

I did wonder a bit about the G5/Xbox2 link back in November, when news first broke that the Xbox2 would likely be running on the G5 chip. At the time, I was idly wondering about the possibility of an Xbox emulator for the Mac (similar to Connectix' old Virtual Gamestation software that allowed Mac users to run Playstation games on their home computer).

Now, though, the news that the seeded G5's are running a custom NT kernel has me wondering along different lines.

In February of '03, Microsoft bought Virtual PC, the PC-emulation software for Macs that allows them to run Windows software inside an emulated PC. They've continued to support and update Virtual PC for the Mac, along with releasing Virtual PC for the PC, allowing Windows machines to run multiple virtual machines on one physical box handy for software testing purposes. Unfortunately, Virtual PC depends on a feature of earlier PowerPC processors that is not present in the G5, so there hasn't been a version of Virtual PC released yet that will run on Apple's flagship G5 desktop machines.

Last month, Microsoft announced that a new G5-compatible version of Virtual PC would be released along with Office 2004. Considering that the Xbox2 SDK is apparently running a customized NT kernel that runs on G5 systems, could some of those same customizations be worked into Virtual PC 7, making for a major speed increase, as more of the low-level code would be running natively on the Mac rather than having to pass through an emulator? I don't really know enough about the innards of how software like this works, so I could be entirely off-base here the differences between the emulation required for Virtual PC and the customizations needed to get the NT kernel running on the PowerPC processor may have absolutely nothing in common but it was enough to get me wondering.

Even more interesting, though, would be if someone could leak some form of benchmarks, even rough ones, showing what kind of performance this customized NT kernel was getting on the SDK machines. I'm assuming it must be at least somewhat respectable, as the machines are being used for creating software for the Xbox2 but how respectable?

And going even more wildly out of the bounds of realityfor years now, there have been rumors of Apple porting the Mac OS to be able to run on Intel-based PCs (realistically, that's not likely to ever be released publicly, but the technology is there). However, what about going the other direction? What if Microsoft were to take these customizations to their kernel and and eventually supplant Virtual PC with an actual build of Longhorn for the G5, either as a "red box" that would allow you to run Windows applications concurrently with Mac OS X applications (we can already run Mac OS X apps, "Classic" Mac OS apps, Unix command-line apps, and Unix X-11 apps all at the same time as it is), or as a dual-boot option (Which OS would you like to run today)?

Likely? I seriously doubt it. But fun to play with.

And I'd still love to find out just how zippy those G5s are running NT. Wouldn't it be a fun little tweak if they were running as fast as (or faster, even) than high-end PCs?

Here you go. PalmOS up to version 5.x is basically the equivalent of MacOS 6 before the Multi-Finder. It's no accident...the people who wrote the PalmOS were former MacOS developers. A Palm, to me, feels like a Compact Mac shrunk down to a handheld size and weight.

Now if only I could make my m125 chime when I turn it on and make the generic Mac system beep when it encounters an error...

Okay, first off, I have no idea how the comment text on that got duplicated.

Second, is it really Troll to honestly state the obvious? Any fool can see that Apple's marketshare is gone and is never coming back. Once a school chooses Windows as its standard OS and bans Apple purchases (as my district did in 2002), there will be no "switching" back.

``Dell is thrashing Apple in terms of new education sales by some 35% to 21% of purchases." (Nov. 2002, source)

Education Market Share
Apple: 15%
Dell: 35%
(Sep. 2002, source)

``The trend toward standardization is hurting Apple where it has traditionally been stronger -- in schools, where information-technology workers are increasingly deciding what computers to buy, despite the protest of Mac-loyal teachers. When Quality Education Data surveyed school districts last fall, 54 percent said their schools used some Macs, while 91 percent said their schools used some Windows PCs. The number of Macs was lower than the year before.
`Apple's market share is declining steadily,' said Jeanne Hayes, president of QED. `Dell is definitely the leader now both in installed base and in share, because they've moved into the server business as well.' "
(Jul. 2003, source; this article also discusses Apple's market share in general and indicates the failure of the "Switch" campaign)

Except LEM has already suggested it.

Nah, the parent is right, the FCC does limit.

My general advice - Apple professional portable range was not updated since last September. This means some update is imminent for next few months. Buying the Big Al now, you will pay the premium price for a '2003 machine. So if you can wait - wait. With Apple being the master of stealth in computer industry, no one can really guess when the new powerbooks will be released - and how good the upgrade will be. But right now, the gap between the hig-end Apple portables and the low-end Apple desktops is way too big. Especially for a company that actually relies on portable products.

Yes, the early iMac and some of the Powerbooks are exceptions to the general rule of Macs being simple to upgrade. I just bought two 256 MB RAM chips to upgrade an iMac to 512 MB, but I haven't installed them yet. It looks a lot like upgrading a G3 powerbook, which I've found to be a bit tricky. Online dealers like OtherWorld Computing will provide accurate info on what a Mac can take (which is often more than Apple's Specs say, which frequently don't take account of newer chips) and will sell you chips guaranteed to work in your model. Another useful reference is LowEndMac

I'm looking to get the cheapest Mac that runs Darwin.

There is a difference between the cheapest Mac that runs OS X, and that runs Darwin. Darwin (the core) will run on a lot older hardware than OS X itself. For instance, you can run Darwin on the PowerMac 8NNN series, but dont try to take a retail OS X and install.

Have a lookt at Low End Mac and Accelerate your Mac. Perhaps they can give you some kind of hint. Now finally, i'd just like to point out that if you indeed want to run OS X, keep in mind that the "minimum requirements", like 128MB ram, is NOT sufficient imho. My G5 even choked on 512MB :)

Really? Like 2 feet as in he's sitting in front of his PC? Oh, and it wasn't too long ago when laptops had 9-10" LCDs and people would read them all day long at 640x480 and 800x600.

I agree with the original poster: all the guy did was use a old Mac PC as a case for his PC. I have no clue why he even bothered with the Mac logo on his window, it's like putting a Camaro Z28 emblem on your Civic.

I'm not impressed and don't think this should have even been on /. There's far more impressive conversions you can do with a old Mac case IMHO.

Media Center PC? Try Macintosh TV

Tablet PC? I have a Fujitsu Sytlistic 1200 tablet PC from 1997.

PocketPC? The Newton did more in 1993 than most PDAs of today. If development had continued...

XBox? Ok it's a game console -- like an Atari. Oh. It's a computer-based console? Try the Pippen (from '95).

Media Player 9? What's so special about it? QuickTime was revolutionary in 1991.

If anything MS is painfully aware that they need to divest themselves of a PC-only mentality and are inovating in a wide number of areas at an alarming rate to ensure that they don't end up with all of their eggs in one basket.

Have you heard of the Digital Hub?

Were you intentionally listing things that were innovative only by Microsoft's definition of the term?

The Lisa may have been expandable, but take this into consideration: Although it worked as a Mac with MacWorks, the Mac emulation SUCKED ASS.

Also, they NEVER let IBM make an Apple clone, and the only thing IBM has ever done in Apple's space is work with the PowerPC line of processors, and manufacture some for Macs (the G3 and G5). However, this site lists the illegal and legal Mac clones.