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How many people sell kit for Apple hardware?

http://www.sonnettech.com/
http://www.powerlogix.com/products/index.html
http://macspeedzone.com/html/hubs/central/upgrades/processor/ (not recent stuff, but that's not the point)
http:/// any hard drive manufacturer

There used to be a few graphics cards available before the move to x86, although they've dried up now. Apple are doing nothing to stop ATi and nVidia from making retail cards for the Mac, so I guess it's just the appearance of low sales (they can only target the Mac Pro, sadly).

Plenty of people make hardware that's either for Macs, or Mac compatible. Some Macs have socket-upgradable processors as well, so you can add Intel to the list.

How many can people sell FairPlay tracks for ipods?

A better question is "How many people can sell music that will play on the iPods?" The answer is about 90% of the world's music retailers, through CDs and non-DRM music. The solution is not to get Apple to licence FairPlay, but to dispose of DRM altogether (and that aim was stated by Steve Jobs in an open letter some time ago). What good does licensing do?

Apple's as much of a monopolist as MS, it's just not as successful (yet).

No, that's just not true. You may think Apple are monopolistic, but they've not been taken to court and convicted of anti-trust charges which have held up under all appeals. They're under fire for the DRM in FairPlay, but they're not being sued around the planet (particularly in the US states and the EU) for their anti-trust misuse of their monopoly. It's a nice convenient little line to trot out that Apple are just as bad as Microsoft, but the evidence doesn't support it and never has. Apple definitely do things their own way, and people disagree with that from time to time, but that doesn't make them a monopolistic company who abuse that power to force others into deals.

"But I predict that legacy hardware--and even some existing boards--will be difficult to run in both environments. Will the high-end video-digitizing Kona card work under Windows? What about M-Audio's multichannel audio input cards? I'll believe it when I see it. Got more faith? Go ahead, buy a dual-core Mac. And have fun upgrading it."

Yes, but that seems to imply that Windows is the non-upgradable one. The Kona card will work fine on the Mac, and so will all of the M-Audio boxen out there. Plus, no DLL or Registry hell.

There is no such thing as an "add-on" processor upgrade.

Aw, heck... Then what do I do with the Add-on processor upgrade I just bought? Sonnet also makes 'em, as do a few other manufacturers.

Have a look at the Mac G4 Cube here:
http://www.cubeowner.com/photopost/showphoto.php/p hoto/674/sort/2/cat/501/page/1

If you stuff an upgrade card into one of these, you'll have a neat looking machine with plenty of power. This site is the place to go to learn about about the G4 Cube.

As the first of the "New World" Macs, the Blue & White G3 will still be supported under 10.4 Tiger. It will happily use any old VGA monitor, any old USB or ADB keyboard or mouse, and up to 1G of any PC100 RAM (except for 512M and single-bank 256M modules). It's even got three 64-bit/33MHz PCI slots. (The video card goes into a fourth 32/66 slot, which was the best you could do before AGP.) The CPU can even be upgraded to 1.1GHz for $350.

You will want to fill it with at least 384M-512M of RAM to get sufficient OS X performance. And make sure to look for the "402" rev-2 IDE controller chip next to the bottom PCI slot.

If you don't want CPU choices, get a Mac!

So upgrade your G3/400. It's a Yosemite, right? How would 1 Gigahertz do ya?

By replacing the stock HD with a Seagate Barracuda V 120gb ($130) and the fan with a Papst fan ($15), I've made it so the the only audible noise my g4 makes comes from the PSU. Pretty quiet and pretty cheap, considering I needed a bigger HD anyway.

But I want it dead quiet, since I use it to record music, and I hate computer noise anyway. So next step is to replace the PSU, probably with one of these ($80). The only problem is, Apple doesn't follow ATX guidelines with its power supplies, but lucky for me some guy's already figured out the differences. Unfortunately, that's only for the Sawtooth g4s, those of you who have something else may be SOL. But there's no reason why you couldn't find out the pinouts of your own particular g4's PSU and match it to the ATX standard.

Only thing is, I'm never going to want to buy a newer machine, b/c my current one rocks so hard (or rather, so softly). So I started looking into g4 upgrade cards (more). I'm probably going to try and hold out till they come out with something that lets me upgrade to a g5, but i figure an upgrade card with the heatsink replaced with something more like this, perhaps with a fan controller, might be the way to go. Anyone know if it's possible to use a heatsink like that on an apple chip?

Of course, if I've got a heatsink like that, I'm going to have to cut a window into the case to show it off. Anyone know anything about how much EM shielding the case offers, and if cutting a big hole in it is a bad idea? I mean, I see all-plexiglass cases around, how do they get around the EMI problem?

If you're claiming that Macs can't be upgraded in general, that's wrong. However, I'd be very surprised to ever see G5 upgrades for G4 Macs. The architecture is so different (much faster bus, true DDR support, Hypertransport, etc) that it just doesn't make sense.

Is that a Kanga, the 3500 with G3 processor? or is it a Wallstreet?

You can upgrade a Walstreet to a G4 processor with the help of PowerLogix

And you're right.. My 400mhz Pismo (2000/firewire) powerbook is durable. It might not be made of titanium or aluminium, but it is nearly indestrutable.

I've had it since July 2000, I just replaced a battery, AC adapter, upgraded to 320 MB ram, and upgraded the harddrive. I'm considering the 900mhz upgrade chip as well. I'm going to continue investing in this machine until it dies or becomes throughly obsolete, I don't see that happening for another 2-3 years. 5-6 years from a $2000 laptop + $800 in upgrades/replacement-parts isn't too bad (including processor upgrade)

... but I'm typing this reply on a Mac that I pieced together for less than $250 all figured. I run OS 9.1 currently, but another $100 worth of parts and I can put OS X on here.

Basically, I started with an old PowerCenter 120 (a PowerPC Mac Clone) with 32MB of RAM. Total cost? $47 from Ebay

Next up, I added 128MB of RAM from Computer Renaissance... it's fussy about is RAM (5V DIMMs). Total cost: $30

Next... I added an old SCSI drive I had knocking around (4Gb drive from an old server of mine). Total cost: $0

THEN I added a Powerlogix G3-400 upgrade card, $85 from Other World Computing. Finally, added a $49 copy of OS9.1 and OSX 10.1 (a bundled special also from OWC).

So what can I do with it? Well, I love the fact that I now have a machine that's relatively trouble-free, runs the applications I use most often with aplomb (word processing, email, Mozilla etc.) and provides me a REAL upgrade path to OSX. Yeah, OSX isn't strictly compatible with my hardware, but the only piece that's truly critical is the video; to be fixed by the addition of a Radeon 7000 in the next few weeks. Everything else can be worked around using XPostFacto.

Worth a thought if you REALLY want to play with OS X but don't want to outlay on the hardware. FYI, this thing runs OS 9.1 faster than my neighbor's 400Mhz Imac... still remains to be seen how X will run.

Total cost for the project: $300 or so
Value of knowing my 5-year old Mac is more reliable and stable than anything with Microsoft OS's on it: priceless!

When I got my Mac 8500/150 in 1996, it was nearly the fastest personal computer money could buy. I used to say widely that it was about half the speed of a Cray 1 supercomputer that cost something like a $million back in 1980. I think the retail price at the time was like $3k.

For the longest time the only upgrade I put in Pishi was 64 MB of RAM, added to the original 32. There are 8 memory slots in here, it will take 1 GB. It is still possible to buy RAM for this box, although it's a little more expensive than today's PC memory.

I used it to bring work home, and later for consulting, for quite a long time. The last paid consulting work I did on her was in the spring of 2001.

In the middle of that job, I finally upgraded, and got a PowerLogix PowerPC G4 CPU upgrade card, as well as some more RAM.

I still have the original 2 MB of video RAM, but I'm thinking of upgrading to the maximum of 4 MB. I could put in a video card, but there are only three PCI slots.

Finally, I bought an Adaptec 29160N Ultra160 SCSI host bus adapter.

I put Mac OS X on it using Ryan Rempel's XPostFacto, and it works OK but is not really fast enough for production work. When I got a contract to do some OS X work I got a 700 Mhz G3 iBook which is really sweet.

The only reason I would want a G4 laptop is so I can do AltiVec programming, but for that I can use my old Mac, it's just not that fast. I'd also like a dual G4 machine to do SMP kernel coding.

What has given Pishi new life, though, was to install Linux on it. It's my main desktop machine, where I do all my web browsing and email. I have a much faster PC that runs Windows 2000 and Slackware, but I have been doing a lot of windows programming this last year so I can't leave it in Linux.

Pishi is running Debian 3.0 (woody) with kernel 2.4.19. And it works just fine.

Besides the increased video ram (so I can run 32-bit at the resolution I use) I'd also like to get an Ultra160 hard drive. The Adaptec card is running a SCSI-II hard drive I've had for years, which has my linux installation. There's only 2 GB on the drive, so I can't really use it for a fileserver, and it gets unresponsive if there's a lot of swapping. If I got a 40 GB Ultra160 drive and maybe some more ram, I could easily get five more years out of this machine.

My Mac is named after my cat Pishi. I say in the above web page about the machine that my parents are looking after her. They eventually brought her to me in Maine, and she was with me for a few months, but sadly she passed away from cancer. I named the machine Pishi because she used to like to sit on top of my monitor a lot back when I was doing a lot of BeOS programming.

Oh, one more thing - the BeOS won't boot with the PowerLogix card. But I understand it will boot with a Newer Technology G3 card. I'm hoping it will also boot with a Newer G4 card. Newer Tech is out of business but it's still possible to buy their cards, even brand new.

http://www.micromac.com
http://www.powerlogix.com
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com
http://www.sonnettech.com

I won't post in Apple threads anymore, since I can't keep up with the Mac bigots.

Whatever ......

Sounds like you need to find a nice 400 or 500 mhz G4 and upgrade it to either a dual 500 mhz G4 setup via Sonnet Technologies or a brand spankin' new upgrade option of a 800mhz or 1ghz G4 via Power Logix

There are also a few over-clockable Sahara G3 upgrades available now. Look around a little in the classifieds or on the sites mentioned or in general ie: google.

Remember also that with 10.2 OS X will be a viable OS on many older systems as long as you can add a 32 MB AGP graphics card to the mix (Quartz Extreme promises to increase performance across-the-board by at least a 150% if not more). That is not to mention the fact that it is supposed to be compiled with GCC 3.x which brings it's own performance boosts as well.

here are no aftermarket options (that I know of) for replacing a processor on a current G4

• PowerLogix is now offering G4 update cards and such.
• Newer Technology has recently been reincarnated... or at least transferred to new ownership. This is really promising, so please don't slashdot their site and put them out of business again :-)
  (yes, they are the people that were always 200Mhz ahead of Apple and had outstanding benchmarks as well, which is more important)

Isn't there suppose to be an issue with the PowerPC 750 that doesn't allow for multi proccessing. The PowerPC 7400 (G4) does.

I remember trying asking Daystar about multiple G3 and they said it couldn't be done due to something involving the L2 Cache.

It looks like these boards can induvidually send the processes out to the chips. Unlike the actual Dual G4 boards from PowerLogix.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.

I'm sorry but Powerlogix doesn't do that with the daughter cards, you are thinking of Newer Technologies. They do that with the daughter cards, this post is incorrect. PowerLogix pulls the ROM off the original board and flashes it onto their upgrade board.

CPU upgrades for the iMac have been around for a long time, the one from Powerlogix is actually semi-normal, instead of mailing off your daughter baord to be used in another upgrade.


...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.

PowerLogix Announces First Dual G4 Upgrade Card

The advantages of the Apple machine are that it will run with a faster system bus and faster memory than an 8500 that has been upgraded with one of these cards, which has to access main memory at the same speed as the conventional 604 does in the original machine.

The advantage of the upgrade card is that you can run it with older system software - note that when Apple releases new machines, usually they require the latest system to run them so they're not a lot of help to developers wanting to maintain application compatibility with old systems.

And what's really cool is that it's possible that the BeOS will run on the cards, and BeOS applications and the whole BeOS system are pervasively multithreaded and so should take great advantage of these cards.

Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines. This is not a problem for an upgraded 8500 and in fact many people are currently using 8500's with G3 upgrade cards.

You can be sure Linux will work on the cards because PowerLogix includes a copy of LinuxPPC with each card they ship.

Sadly, a Be employee who bought a PowerLogix card for his Power Computing home machine found that it didn't work to run the BeOS - he's very happy with it on the MacOS. Many other G3 cards do work with the BeOS though.

I have very enthusiastically urged PowerLogix to support the BeOS in their cards and offered to beta test for them on my 8500.

They also have a USB/Firewire card that allows older mac owners to take advantage of all those spiffy peripherals and video editing software that's available for the new machines. I'm waiting until the dual G4 ships to purchase an upgrade but I'll be getting the rapidfire card so I can use an HP Deskjet USB printer on my mac.

PowerLogix Announces First Dual G4 Upgrade Card

The advantages of the Apple machine are that it will run with a faster system bus and faster memory than an 8500 that has been upgraded with one of these cards, which has to access main memory at the same speed as the conventional 604 does in the original machine.

The advantage of the upgrade card is that you can run it with older system software - note that when Apple releases new machines, usually they require the latest system to run them so they're not a lot of help to developers wanting to maintain application compatibility with old systems.

And what's really cool is that it's possible that the BeOS will run on the cards, and BeOS applications and the whole BeOS system are pervasively multithreaded and so should take great advantage of these cards.

Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines. This is not a problem for an upgraded 8500 and in fact many people are currently using 8500's with G3 upgrade cards.

You can be sure Linux will work on the cards because PowerLogix includes a copy of LinuxPPC with each card they ship.

Sadly, a Be employee who bought a PowerLogix card for his Power Computing home machine found that it didn't work to run the BeOS - he's very happy with it on the MacOS. Many other G3 cards do work with the BeOS though.

I have very enthusiastically urged PowerLogix to support the BeOS in their cards and offered to beta test for them on my 8500.

They also have a USB/Firewire card that allows older mac owners to take advantage of all those spiffy peripherals and video editing software that's available for the new machines. I'm waiting until the dual G4 ships to purchase an upgrade but I'll be getting the rapidfire card so I can use an HP Deskjet USB printer on my mac.

PowerLogix Announces First Dual G4 Upgrade Card

The advantages of the Apple machine are that it will run with a faster system bus and faster memory than an 8500 that has been upgraded with one of these cards, which has to access main memory at the same speed as the conventional 604 does in the original machine.

The advantage of the upgrade card is that you can run it with older system software - note that when Apple releases new machines, usually they require the latest system to run them so they're not a lot of help to developers wanting to maintain application compatibility with old systems.

And what's really cool is that it's possible that the BeOS will run on the cards, and BeOS applications and the whole BeOS system are pervasively multithreaded and so should take great advantage of these cards.

Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines. This is not a problem for an upgraded 8500 and in fact many people are currently using 8500's with G3 upgrade cards.

You can be sure Linux will work on the cards because PowerLogix includes a copy of LinuxPPC with each card they ship.

Sadly, a Be employee who bought a PowerLogix card for his Power Computing home machine found that it didn't work to run the BeOS - he's very happy with it on the MacOS. Many other G3 cards do work with the BeOS though.

I have very enthusiastically urged PowerLogix to support the BeOS in their cards and offered to beta test for them on my 8500.

They also have a USB/Firewire card that allows older mac owners to take advantage of all those spiffy peripherals and video editing software that's available for the new machines. I'm waiting until the dual G4 ships to purchase an upgrade but I'll be getting the rapidfire card so I can use an HP Deskjet USB printer on my mac.

PowerLogix Announces First Dual G4 Upgrade Card

The advantages of the Apple machine are that it will run with a faster system bus and faster memory than an 8500 that has been upgraded with one of these cards, which has to access main memory at the same speed as the conventional 604 does in the original machine.

The advantage of the upgrade card is that you can run it with older system software - note that when Apple releases new machines, usually they require the latest system to run them so they're not a lot of help to developers wanting to maintain application compatibility with old systems.

And what's really cool is that it's possible that the BeOS will run on the cards, and BeOS applications and the whole BeOS system are pervasively multithreaded and so should take great advantage of these cards.

Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines. This is not a problem for an upgraded 8500 and in fact many people are currently using 8500's with G3 upgrade cards.

You can be sure Linux will work on the cards because PowerLogix includes a copy of LinuxPPC with each card they ship.

Sadly, a Be employee who bought a PowerLogix card for his Power Computing home machine found that it didn't work to run the BeOS - he's very happy with it on the MacOS. Many other G3 cards do work with the BeOS though.

I have very enthusiastically urged PowerLogix to support the BeOS in their cards and offered to beta test for them on my 8500.

They also have a USB/Firewire card that allows older mac owners to take advantage of all those spiffy peripherals and video editing software that's available for the new machines. I'm waiting until the dual G4 ships to purchase an upgrade but I'll be getting the rapidfire card so I can use an HP Deskjet USB printer on my mac.

PowerLogix Announces First Dual G4 Upgrade Card

The advantages of the Apple machine are that it will run with a faster system bus and faster memory than an 8500 that has been upgraded with one of these cards, which has to access main memory at the same speed as the conventional 604 does in the original machine.

The advantage of the upgrade card is that you can run it with older system software - note that when Apple releases new machines, usually they require the latest system to run them so they're not a lot of help to developers wanting to maintain application compatibility with old systems.

And what's really cool is that it's possible that the BeOS will run on the cards, and BeOS applications and the whole BeOS system are pervasively multithreaded and so should take great advantage of these cards.

Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines. This is not a problem for an upgraded 8500 and in fact many people are currently using 8500's with G3 upgrade cards.

You can be sure Linux will work on the cards because PowerLogix includes a copy of LinuxPPC with each card they ship.

Sadly, a Be employee who bought a PowerLogix card for his Power Computing home machine found that it didn't work to run the BeOS - he's very happy with it on the MacOS. Many other G3 cards do work with the BeOS though.

I have very enthusiastically urged PowerLogix to support the BeOS in their cards and offered to beta test for them on my 8500.

They also have a USB/Firewire card that allows older mac owners to take advantage of all those spiffy peripherals and video editing software that's available for the new machines. I'm waiting until the dual G4 ships to purchase an upgrade but I'll be getting the rapidfire card so I can use an HP Deskjet USB printer on my mac.

PowerLogix Announces First Dual G4 Upgrade Card

The advantages of the Apple machine are that it will run with a faster system bus and faster memory than an 8500 that has been upgraded with one of these cards, which has to access main memory at the same speed as the conventional 604 does in the original machine.

The advantage of the upgrade card is that you can run it with older system software - note that when Apple releases new machines, usually they require the latest system to run them so they're not a lot of help to developers wanting to maintain application compatibility with old systems.

And what's really cool is that it's possible that the BeOS will run on the cards, and BeOS applications and the whole BeOS system are pervasively multithreaded and so should take great advantage of these cards.

Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines. This is not a problem for an upgraded 8500 and in fact many people are currently using 8500's with G3 upgrade cards.

You can be sure Linux will work on the cards because PowerLogix includes a copy of LinuxPPC with each card they ship.

Sadly, a Be employee who bought a PowerLogix card for his Power Computing home machine found that it didn't work to run the BeOS - he's very happy with it on the MacOS. Many other G3 cards do work with the BeOS though.

I have very enthusiastically urged PowerLogix to support the BeOS in their cards and offered to beta test for them on my 8500.

They also have a USB/Firewire card that allows older mac owners to take advantage of all those spiffy peripherals and video editing software that's available for the new machines. I'm waiting until the dual G4 ships to purchase an upgrade but I'll be getting the rapidfire card so I can use an HP Deskjet USB printer on my mac.

Sounds like you need help finding the Macintosh Product Guide

...how many manufacturers make hardware for your appletosh?

Try out the Hardware section.

You want a cdburner for your mac

I already have one, thanks. A Yamaha with Adaptec Toast.
Adaptec lists over 150 Mac-compatible CD-R/RW drives in their database (select toast from bottom menu).

a floppy drive?

iFloppy
SuperDisk
Addonics
Teac

a G4 upgrade?

PowerLogix
Newertech

where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I'll send you to Microsoft's own website for more information about that little feature called meta-data.

Or read how the Microsoft Annual report was written on a Macintosh.

It's so funny when people talk about things they know nothing about.

Sounds like you need help finding the Macintosh Product Guide

...how many manufacturers make hardware for your appletosh?

Try out the Hardware section.

You want a cdburner for your mac

I already have one, thanks. A Yamaha with Adaptec Toast.
Adaptec lists over 150 Mac-compatible CD-R/RW drives in their database (select toast from bottom menu).

a floppy drive?

iFloppy
SuperDisk
Addonics

a G4 upgrade?

PowerLogix
Newertech

where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I'll send you to Microsoft's own website for more information about that little undocumented feature called meta-data.



It's so funny when people talk about things they know nothing about.

www.newertech.com
www.sonnet.com
www.powerlogix.com
www.xlr8.com

Try going to http://www.macbuy.com and choosing cpu upgrades from the hardware list. I currently see ~60 products from 6 or 7 companies for macs ranging from the 61xx series to the 7x00, 8x00, 9x00 series to the G3. Most of those open without having to remove any screws. I upgraded my 7500 to a 200mhz 604e in 5 minutes - it has worked flawlessly since I bought it. You can't tell me it was difficult to upgrade my Mac. (and the 200mhz card only cost me $99 a year ago).

www.newertech.com
www.sonnet.com
www.powerlogix.com
www.xlr8.com

Try going to http://www.macbuy.com and choosing cpu upgrades from the hardware list. I currently see ~60 products from 6 or 7 companies for macs ranging from the 61xx series to the 7x00, 8x00, 9x00 series to the G3. Most of those open without having to remove any screws. I upgraded my 7500 to a 200mhz 604e in 5 minutes - it has worked flawlessly since I bought it. You can't tell me it was difficult to upgrade my Mac. (and th 200mhz card only cost me $99 a year ago).

What apple did was release a firmware patch which makes the computer check to see if its using a G3 cpu before allowing startup (it's not a patch to the normal ROM - if it had been, any idiot would have been able to reverse the patch, as the MacOS ROM is a file on the disk on recent Macs).

It was known before this batch of G3s even shipped that they'd be G4 upgradeable, but apple released a software patch which seems to prevent g4 upgrades. OH NO!! Not a software patch! The treachery! They'll never get around THAT! Apple knows the futility of this.

Lets look at what Apple actually has done for their customers, upgrade-wise. The long lived family of PCI powermacs, the [789][356]00 series, all have processor daughterboards, which are replaceable, all the way up to G3 or even potentially G4 CPUs. Earlier powermacs can be upgraded to G3s with "L2-cache" upgrades (a CPU on a card fits in where the L2 cache normally goes, and overrides the existing CPU). Apple's G3 desktops all have zif sockets for easy and cheap upgradability. Apple's entire line of desktops uses one type of socket. I think that's pretty good. How many different sockets do you get across the pentium/ppro/p2/p3/celeron/k6/k7-athlon? How many such cpus can be used as an upgrade for one of the other cpus?

I own one of the first PowerMac G3/400s (Blue & White). I remain quite confident that by the time I want to upgrade it, G4 upgrades from third party companies like XLR8, newertech, and powerlogix will be waiting for me.