What to do with G3 233 MHz Blue & White PowerPC

I bought about $1000 of Apple stock right before Steve introduced the iMac, and then thought of myself as a financial genius when I sold that stock for about $5,000. If I held onto it, it'd be work over $1,500,000 today.

If it assuages your financial conscience at all, you actually didn't "lose" as much as you may think. $1000 invested in Apple on 1/1/1998 (before the iMac was introduced on May 5, 1998) is "only" worth $44,381.40 today, not quite the $1,500,000 you quoted:

<http://hallenius.org/pics/aapl010198.png>

And if you'd invested in 1996, before Steve came back, you'd actually have gained "only" $22,448.60!

(*Calculations courtesy of the "What if I had invested?" tool on Sharebuilder.com.)

suthepmac.com wrote:
>
>
> On Jun 22, 2008, at 1:47 PM, David Weintraub wrote:

> seems to be some confusion here with nomenclature;
>
> my B+W G3 was a tower, 300 MHz, and i have run every version of OSX
> since the Beta on it up until Tiger -
>
> i could not, however, get OSX to run on my kids iMac (which happened
> to be Blue + White but was never called a B+W G3)
>
Since we're talking about an old B&W tower you might have the issue of the original models which had problems with the IDE drive interface. It turned out to have serious data corruption issues with drives other than the original under OS9 and likely most any drive under OS X.

David

At 3:05 PM -0700 6/22/08, suthepmac.com wrote:

>--snip--
>
>seems to be some confusion here with nomenclature;
>
>
>my B+W G3 was a tower, 300 MHz, and i have run every version of OSX
>since the Beta on it up until Tiger -
>
>
>i could not, however, get OSX to run on my kids iMac (which happened
>to be Blue + White but was never called a B+W G3)
>

The confusion happened because it says 233 MHz in the subject line of
original post and 233 was an iMac speed.

<http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g3/stats/powermac_g3_300_bl.html>
seems to be the correct Mac.

My personal opinion is don't invest any money in a 9 year old box.
Some other part may be getting old as in getting ready to fail. Its
better to save your money to buy a newer Mac. By newer, used G4 or G5
or early Intel Macs would be quite an upgrade while being cheaper
than the current Macs.

Besides the 300MHz G3, it also has 1GB max RAM, slow USB 1, no
support for drives over 128GB, support status=obsolete, slow ATA/33
drive bus.

Yes, it can officially run Tiger if you add RAM and a bigger HD altho
it may feel more like walking Tiger than running it. Handling plain
text e-mail should be fine. Complex websites or overly fancy e-mail
often require latest browsers or clients to display properly and
those work best on faster Macs.

I just replaced a G4 dual GHz Mac--which was a lot faster than your
G3--with a current model and speed increase is very, very noticeable.
Please note that MHz/GHz comparisons are not directly comparable
because each new generation--G3 to G4 to G5 to Intel--was much faster
at running code than a simple MHz/GHz comparison would suggest.

--Jim

ssteve schrieb:

> or should I just get rid of it somehow?

in that case, http://www.freecycle.org always is a good address for
beloved old stuff that's too precious to throw away or recycle -- why
not give it a loving new home? It won't cost you a cent cause it's
only per


BTW my Eudora search has told me me that Freecycle was mentioned here
in 2007 already :-)


[Or see the article I wrote. -Adam]

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9100>


--
Thomas Rohde
tombonobo.com

You're Quite Correct. 9.2.2 is the best you can do:

<http://www.topix.net/world/canada/2008/06/freecycle-craigs-list-are-e-mail-based-networks-to-help-users-exchange-free-goods>

He probably means an iMac rather than a mini-tower, but incidentally the Gossamer 233MHz beige minitower did have some color: a Bondi-blue button on the top to release the side panel.

I'm not sure which Mac ssteve actually has, but he might try going to <http://support.apple.com/specs/> and entering the serial number in the search field.

As for running Mac OS X on an older Mac, I had Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) running on a PowerBook G3 Series "Bronze Keyboard" (amazing how Apple names its products sometimes) with a 333Mhz G3, 384MB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive. As I remember, Mac OS X 10.3 was usable on this Mac, but noticeably slower than 10.4 (Tiger) runs on my PowerBook G4 (1.33GHz, 1.25GB, 250GB) for example.