iMac G4(K)
173 comments
·February 26, 2025JKCalhoun
gigatexal
It’s so cute!!!
I wish Apple would release a retro line like this and with it the M4 chips.
xattt
For all intents and porpoises, it should be the video HomePod variant.
edit: … with a “Follow Me” FaceTime camera
rbanffy
But this camera turns the screen to follow you.
rbanffy
After all the DEI shenanigans, Apple should bring the rainbow apple logo back.
They’d probably lose all federal contracts for four years, but they’d gain some even more dedicated following.
WillAdams
While I bitterly objected to Steve Jobs cancelling the Newton (apparently one of the reasons was the USMC having great success testing them for battlefield use and being on the verge of a general deployment/contract and SJ not wanting to be a Defense Contractor), I'll have to buy something (my first Apple purchase for myself since buying OpenSTEP 4.2) if Apple continues to be the only principled multi-national.
DonHopkins
Make the Apple logo on the back of the laptop be a full color display that lights up with the rainbow when you run the full screen Apple ][ simulator.
Clamchop
It's nearly Apple's 50th anniversary. I've thought for a while now that a limited run of the rainbow logo on their products would be a great (and lucrative) celebration gimmick.
Crontab
Love that idea. I would totally buy a M4 Cube.
hot_gril
The design is practically begging for someone to try swapping out the computer side. It's almost like a tower-and-screen setup.
MBCook
People have done it. The most recent Mac mini’s are so small that their guts can be crammed in the bottom if you replace the original board and power supply. Then put a brand new screen up at the top and run the wires through the arm and you get something really cool.
classichasclass
Isn't that basically what the article is?
bsimpson
It's wild that there was a feeling when that computer came out of "this is the coolest computer design ever," and then the world moved past that.
You can look at the iMac line and see that they moved to a more laptopy everything-in-the-screen design, which got rid of the base altogether. But it's weird and sad that there was a "best" and then things that came after the best that were less fun, and two decades later we all still seem to feel that way.
I suppose part of that was all the attention that shifted to touchscreen phones, and computers becoming thought of as practical work tools.
cogman10
What's wild to me is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are basically computer illiterate by and large.
The reason old computers were fun is because all the hip young millennials loved them for everything. That has become much less the case as the younger generations do everything with a phone/tablet/or console. Just surfing the internet for my generation was a chore that is hard for the younger generations to understand.
mrweasel
> What's wild to me is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are basically computer illiterate by and large.
That really depends on how you define computer literate, because I'm seeing some incredible work being done by the younger generations, both for modern computers, but also for the machines of my youth in the 80s and 90s. Most of the Gen Z I previously taught might not know Excel, Word or even Windows, but they certainly knows how to use and abuse Google Docs and Sheets.
As for deep knowledge on the inner workings of a PC, I don't think they are worse of then previous generations. You have a tiny group of absolute geniuses, a small, but larger group of above average who will become future engineers and developers, then an tiny group of people who can operate modern Windows applications will insane skill levels, and finally the reset, who can sort of get by.
cogman10
> I'm seeing some incredible work being done by the younger generations, both for modern computers, but also for the machines of my youth in the 80s and 90s.
I don't dispute that. The younger generations have a huge leg up in terms of available educational resources.
My point is more that the average millennial will be computer literate while the average genz or alpha will not. By literate I mean having a basic understanding of how computers work. Like what a file is, how to find them, what a hard drive or mouse is and does. How to type.
I didn't doubt that the younger Gens will likely run circles around me in terms of programming. Similar to how there were really smart computer literate gen x and boomers.
bsimpson
You might be off by a generation.
I was born in 86. My dad got the first Mac as he was graduating from college. I think I was 13 when the iMac G3 and the X Public Beta came out.
Computers were well entrenched in my childhood, but it was the people who were adults when we were children that designed the fun ones.
cogman10
You're a millennial :)
I agree that adults designed our fun computers but those were adults that specialized in making those devices. If you looked at the average Gen Xer of the era you'd find they have very little interaction with computers.
It was our generation who had computers in the home as children. Very few of prior generations had that privilege.
organsnyder
I was born in 84. My dad was an early adopter of PCs and online communication (BBSes, CompuServe, and later the Internet), and we always had a computer in the house. I also got to tinker with his old machines when he upgraded, which taught me a lot.
However, having a home computer was still somewhat of a luxury, and definitely not a necessity until at least high school for me. It wasn't until college that I could ask someone what their email address was without first asking whether they had email at all.
pjmlp
Yes, as Gen X still into gaming, it is kind of interesting seeing all those remarks about the rise of PC gaming, PC gaming, alongside 8 and 16 bit home computers were all that we had, in Europe almost no one was that into consoles.
They existed surely, with SEGA on the forefront, but not something most households cared about.
Home computers gaming was what the majority of us had.
hot_gril
I don't know if you're thinking about all the millennials or just a few. PCs weren't as common in the early 90s.
bluedino
They weren't?
My view is certainly skewed since we had a 386SX, but there were tens of thousands of BBS's running back then. Online services exploded in the early 90's, shareware games like Doom and Wolfenstein sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1992, Gateway 2000 surpassed Dell by selling over a billion dollars in PC's.
JeremyHerrman
Sure, computers grew in popularity throughout the 90s but I wouldn't call them uncommon in the early 90s - they were all over the place especially in schools.
My kindergarten classroom had an Apple II in 1989. Our first grade classroom had old IBM PCs.
My parents bought our first computer in '94 and we were one of the later families to have one (these were actual middle class families).
cogman10
I know there's computer illiterate millennials. If you could turn it into a literacy ranking or percentage my argument is that more millennials (by a large margin) are computer literate than any other generation.
pjmlp
PC as such no much.
Spectrums, Commodore, Atari, Amiga, PC, Acorn, as home computers ecosystem surely.
At least in Europe we weren't that much into consoles, having a home system was one from the list above.
dylan604
> What's wild to me is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are basically computer illiterate by and large.
That's something I've realized as well. There was a time where typing was something more and more people could do, but now nobody cares/needs to learn how. The number of households that had at least one computer was something I thought would get to pretty much everyone, but now there are more and more people with the only compute device being their phone. Owning a computer seems to be an age indicator like wearing tube socks.
fjjjrjj
I have a teenager and a elementary schooler and both enjoy PC gaming.
The elder is interested in game development through his love of Roblox. I hope to help him get started with an IDE for lua, git, and a LLM and turn him loose on it.
amatecha
Well, those wild/creative designs WERE the "practical work tools". Check out the PowerMac G3, this thing looks totally colourful and silly but this was the most powerful machine Apple made at the time: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lhutton/48688728841/ (also dang I still really want one, still haven't found a good deal on one lol)
dylan604
I owned a G3 that was the last beige box Apple made before that clear plastic Fisher Price looking unit. I didn't mind the colorful iMacs. In my mind, the iMacs were fun things and the colors were okay, but the towers were meant to be serious computers and fun is just not allowed or something moronic. Those towers were just something I never cared for with no real reason. Oh, and the hockey puck mouse that came out around that time. Yuck
webworker
There's a cache of them in a storage unit east of Atlanta. You can still find the listing on Facebook marketplace.
I bought a B&W machine from the guy for $50 or $60.
Also grabbed a G4 Digital Audio tower. To my surprise, it was a top-end 733 MHz model.
amatecha
Oh damn, nice! thanks for the tip. I'm up in Vancouver BC though so kind of a stretch unfortunately
hot_gril
or the G4 Cube
sgerenser
The ironic thing is, when Steve Jobs introduced this form factor, he made a joke about the “obvious” choice just being a flat slab with the computer guts tucked behind the monitor. But Apple would never do something that boring! https://youtu.be/k74NgDbR7gI?si=zEgsUiQazXB5f1dP&t=3777
WWLink
The imac g5 that followed was such a boring and ugly design compared to the G4. There was no mistaking that LOL. I don't think anyone liked it.
tonyedgecombe
It looked good on the inside.
webworker
The really should have kept that design around longer, iterated on it.
Maybe it just wasn't possible to put a G5 on that small of a logic board, but it's still an absolutely stunning computer. I have one sitting on my kitchen counter right now!
pazimzadeh
? he clearly explains that they couldn't place the CD/DVD drive vertically without reducing the read/write speeds by a lot
hot_gril
Anecdotally, the CD/DVD drive in the G5 was super unreliable.
chicom_malware
[dead]
hot_gril
It's wild to me how many very different iMac form factors there were a few years apart. Somehow as a little kid, I remember seeing the iMac G3 and G5 (and the eMac) everywhere but not the iMac G4 until much later. One day was like, wut is that.
firecall
At least Framework released a new Desktop
And they tried to be fun with it!
The 3D printed tiles on the front are a very cool idea and just perfect right now I think! :-)
yjftsjthsd-h
I also like the colored backs on the 12 inch laptop they announced
starkparker
Moving the ports from the stand to the back of the display remains the single most baffling decision of the iMac line, regardless of everything else.
The stand is stationary regardless of the display angle and way more conducive to stable cable management. The last few generations of iMac made removing the stand technically not a user-serviceable action, so manufacturing USB-hub stand risers custom-fit to iMacs is practically its own industry.
A device still bound by mandates to be unnecessarily thin and light, and with an arbitrarily non-removable stand, can still make the stand a few centimeters thicker, run a fixed line from the logic board and into the stand, and put some or all of the ports inside it.
Hell, go wild and make the bottom of the stand a full inch thick, and you could put a user-accessible m.2 port in it,[1] but that damages the justification for upcharging $200 to add 256GB of storage.
1: https://www.amazon.com/PULWTOP-Adapter-Accessories-Docking-I...
Eric_WVGG
> and then the world moved past that
I’m 100% sure it was just too expensive to keep making.
Jobs probably said “price be damned, I love this thing and the manufacturing cost will go down over time” and it didn’t.
SahAssar
Looking at imac G3->G4->G5 each one was a huge step in design. I think the G4 stands out to me because the "floating" display was something I had never seen before.
BuildTheRobots
The G3 an G4 towers deserve extra special design mention. From a tinkering and engineering point of view, they were _lovely_ to work on.
jshier
Only the Bondi Blue G3 towers, the previous beige G3 towers were much worse to work on.
jasongill
"there is noticeable color banding on the screen"
The LCD panel in the G4 iMac is only 6 bits per pixel, compared to 10 bits per pixel on a modern Macbook Pro or similar, so the banding is just the dithering required to display the gradient shadow
Toutouxc
> so the banding is just the dithering required to display
I know what you're trying to say, but this sounds weird. Dithering is a technique employed to PREVENT banding, it does not cause banding.
js2
Really? Apple sold the device as capable of displaying "millions of colors" which you don't get to with 6 bits per pixel.
jasongill
Yes, it's an LG LM171W02-TTA1 which is a 6-bit TN panel; most (all?) TN panels of that era were 6-bit at best, so it could only display ~256k colors
rendaw
It sounds like you're disagreeing, but GP is right per https://support.apple.com/en-us/112313
> 15-inch (viewable) TFT active-matrix LCD, 1024 by 768 pixels, millions of colors
I'm not super familiar with macs, but AFAICT that's the product being described here.
js2
Thank you for the clarification.
LocalH
You do with temporal dithering
jrmg
Was going to post this too. It was a popular technique for getting ‘more colors’ out of lower bit depth panels.
Weirdly hard to find out with a web search if his was done on the iMac G4 (your comment is already one of the top results for me on Google and DDG!).
mixmastamyk
Thousands and “millions of colors” in the control panel came from the CRT days. Guess they didn’t have the heart to reduce that just because the display device didn’t fully support it.
bzzzt
It's the difference between 16 bits per pixel and 32 bits per pixel in VRAM.
A screen using 18 bits per pixel (6 bits per color) would need the 'millions of colors' mode unless Apple designed some clever hack.
joecool1029
BTW, this site has the flying toaster screensaver if you leave it open long enough. Nice easter egg!
nalathna
Also came to report the same! A wonderful retro flashback to cheer me up this morning.
elheffe80
Glad I saw I wasn't the only one who found this. Nice easter egg indeed!!
niwtsol
I came to share the news as well, I see there are some other multi-taskers here!
hadad
seem using this web lib/app https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/
ilamont
I had one of these! I think the common nicknames were “lampshade” or “half dome” at the time. I wrote my graduate thesis on it.
It was a very capable Mac that could even play 3D games smoothly - Wolfenstein and a bundled game for kids about escaped aliens who crash landed out west.
One of the best features was the swivel screen, which you could easily whip around to show something to someone else in the room.
microtherion
I've often heard it called "Luxo Jr.", after the Pixar short https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3O60o5U7w
Made particular sense since Steve was majority shareholder of Pixar as well at the time.
classichasclass
Still have a 15" 1.25GHz iMac G4 on my desk, still works, runs Tiger. I mostly use it as a terminal and for Classic apps, but it does very well at both. Occasionally it plays DVDs or music CDs for the kitchen with a set of Pro Speakers.
voidfunc
This was my favorite iMac design.
MarcelOlsz
For a (somewhat) short period of time, school/college computer labs were awesome to walk into. It was fun seeing tons of multi colored G3's.
NegativeLatency
I was in nearly the sweet spot for this in school computer labs as a kid so it felt like a long time to me. They only started to get boring looking when I graduated from high school.
sejje
At my school they all had Netscape navigator. So slow.
We called it nutscrape
floren
Conveniently color-coded so you could tell at a glance which were the older crappier ones!
fredoralive
I'm kinda split between it and the original G3 range (slot loading preferably, but in the original bright transparent colours before it got weird with stuff like "blue Dalmatian"). The anglepoise Mac is kinda near beginning of the rather sterile Apple aesthetic that has never gone away, but it's also incredibly neat in a packaging sense that a CRT could never be. I kinda want a combination, but I'm not sure if you could get away with the colour bits on an all-in-one without the large area needed for the CRT neck...
The Blue and White PowerMac G3 is my ultimate best looking Mac, there's something about the giant G3 on the sides, and the bold colours for what is a "professional" system. Sadly it all got toned down for the G4...
voidfunc
The G3 were cool in a different way. I miss the playful coloring of late 90s devices. Computers grew up but did we also need our game consoles to become soulless rip offs of Apple industrial design?
Edit: I want a translucent atomic purple phone damnit!
hot_gril
It was late 90s / early 2000s specifically, right? N64 was colorful, GameCube a bit less, but not the SNES, Genesis, NES, etc. Kinda the same with the Mac GUIs.
webworker
As a owner of both slot load and tray load G3's, I strongly prefer the tray loaders. The drives still work, while I have to jam a credit card with double-sided tape into the drive to get a disc out of the slot load drive.
amatecha
Yeah, I have two of the G4's and while they are really nice, I'd love a PowerMac G3 sometime. I have G5's as well, and again they are cool, but not in the way the G3 was -- just so striking and IMO creativity-inspiring.
asdff
The best part of this design was that it felt so nice. Just playing with the monitor adjustment was so satisfying and felt like such a high quality product. Almost made up for the mouse. Almost.
null
wkat4242
Wow that docklite is amazing. Not supporting screen of on blanking is a stupid oversight though.
Unfortunately my G4 iMac suffers from the lame arm issue which affects most of them at this age. And it's difficult and kinda dangerous to fix (a huuuge amount of tension on the spring).
I bought one used because it was such a beautiful machine. Most beautiful Mac ever.
amatecha
If I could choose only one computer design to have for the rest of my life, it would be this one. So cool. I hope jcs sold the spare parts or is otherwise hanging onto them for future use/donation/sale (rather than scrapping them). Parts for older computers are harder to find every day, unsurprisingly.
meebee
This is exactly the type of project I would love to do to my 2017 27" iMac Retina 5k. It's getting a bit slow, so I would love to salvage the beautiful screen and drive it with a new mini. But alas I can't find any similar kits like the Juicy Crumb Docklite.
kccqzy
I have one of the first 5K iMacs from 2014. I contemplated doing a similar project but I don't really want to destroy a perfectly fine computer. It doesn't run the latest OS, but it still runs the latest Chrome though. I often use it to SSH into a more powerful machine for coding, and I occasionally use remote desktop.
If Google decides not to support this for Chrome, I'll firewall it from the internet but still plan to use it as an SSH machine.
dwood_dev
Looks like you can do that for $200-$300.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1f9s8kk/comment/luquux...
bloomingkales
What is so difficult about allowing that screen to be powered by another computer? Apple is really crazy, because I know that screen costs a fortune.
klausa
When that Mac was first released, there was literally no external connection that would let you drive that display.
HDMI and DP at the time didn't have enough bandwidth to support 5k60.
I was working at Apple when that particular model Mac was being developed. Those of us with no need-to-know got odd prototypes that looked more like a steel ammo box with bundle of cables coming out the back — tethered to a display that you had to prop up (some people might have got a kind of simple stand for the display).
In any event, the elaborate arm mechanism, dome plastics we would not know until the model was unveiled to the world at whatever the event was.
Before that though, the steel box didn't stop us from opening it up to look inside. Though our steel enclosures had something closer to a baseball "home plate" footprint, when we peeked inside we saw the circular PCB and knew we were being duped.
With the dangly display they seemed to go quicker than other prototypes to the dumpsters left in Apple's hallways when the actual product was released. I am aware of three MAME machines I built around discarded prototypes. (Shhh!!!!)
I think two of the three prototypes running MAME died eventually — the third I left behind at Apple when I retired. So, fate unknown.
Shortly after though is probably when Apple started locking the dumpsters to keep out the divers like me. (Well, probably more to keep them from ending up on eBay I suspect.)