Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Do any of you daily drive a PPC Mac?
- Thread starter sparty411
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I don’t. DD duties fall to a macpro1,1 & Alu 08 unibody MB running Elcap.
I’m on & off a few powerpcs through the week but DD duties fall to the above machines at this point. I’ve gotten the hankering to pull out my dual1ghz quicksilver running Leopard tho which I think I will do when I build new desks this summer sometime.
I’m on & off a few powerpcs through the week but DD duties fall to the above machines at this point. I’ve gotten the hankering to pull out my dual1ghz quicksilver running Leopard tho which I think I will do when I build new desks this summer sometime.
Yes.
eMac, of which I have two identical 1.25 GHz.
Boots to an SSD, with Leopard. Works well with 2GB of RAM.
eMac, of which I have two identical 1.25 GHz.
Boots to an SSD, with Leopard. Works well with 2GB of RAM.
What makes or breaks usability for you? The lack of raw speed, or the software limitations?
Up until a year or so ago I did with a G5 Quad on Leopard - I didn't switch for lack of functionality more wanting to cut my electricty bill!
I recently coped for a month with just a 12" G4 Powerbook:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/surviving-with-a-powerbook.2177228/
As you might expect, encountering websites where I was prepared for javascript loaded content was the biggest obstacle.
I recently coped for a month with just a 12" G4 Powerbook:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/surviving-with-a-powerbook.2177228/
As you might expect, encountering websites where I was prepared for javascript loaded content was the biggest obstacle.
Both really. With my Elcap & Sierra machines, there’s a whole level of app/cloud synchronicity that occurs between my iPhone, iPads, iMessage/texts, iTunes etc. that’s non existent with my ppc machines.
I still certainly use my ppc boxes & enjoy building up, repairing & squeezing precious performance out of them but aside from the above issues, they’re also becoming frail & daily use has really illustrated this with my own ppc machines in cracking plastics, failed gpus, squirrelly lobos, dead psus etc.
Yanno it's like making grandpa run a 6 minute mile LOL. You can, but for the long term health of your grandpa, do you really want to when you have much more capable machines to pull full time DD duties.
Last edited:
Can't blame you there. Running a miniature nuclear reactor on a daily basis would hurt my wallet as well.. As for your 12" PB escapade, that is pretty neat. The small form factor of those machines makes them so much more bearable to use. The only thing holding me back from using my 800 MHz 12 " ibook G3 as a daily laptop, is the fact that I can't seem to find a torrent client that supports magnet links. Browsing the web is nearly tolerable with TFF since @eyoungren and @z970mp convinced me to ditch NoScript for Umatrix
Browsing the web is nearly tolerable with TFF since @eyoungren and @z970mp convinced me to ditch NoScript for Umatrix
What about ArcticFox - have you tried that? Much lighter than TFF.
I have, but I've found that it is only marginally faster than my tuned up TFF, and quite a few of the sites I frequent are more or less broken.
Yes.
I'm currently on a 15" PowerBook DLSD, maxed out RAM and with an SSD, and I use it almost all of the time along with my Pismo G4 (upgrade courtesy of @LightBulbFun).
There's nothing much I can't do, so I only use my MacBook Pro for iPhone backups and Messages, and any heavy video conversions.
Actually I'm waiting on a 2nd DLSD as a spare, and I've just bargained a brand new in the box genuine Apple battery for the PowerBooks (£20). It was still in the wrapper since 2004, flat of course, but it charged up fine
Cheers
Hugh
Edit:- Forgot to mention, PowerBook DLSD on Leopard; Pismo on Tiger
I'm currently on a 15" PowerBook DLSD, maxed out RAM and with an SSD, and I use it almost all of the time along with my Pismo G4 (upgrade courtesy of @LightBulbFun
).There's nothing much I can't do, so I only use my MacBook Pro for iPhone backups and Messages, and any heavy video conversions.
Actually I'm waiting on a 2nd DLSD as a spare, and I've just bargained a brand new in the box genuine Apple battery for the PowerBooks (£20). It was still in the wrapper since 2004, flat of course, but it charged up fine
Cheers
Hugh
Edit:- Forgot to mention, PowerBook DLSD on Leopard; Pismo on Tiger
Last edited:
@sparty411 What about IceWeaselPPC with those TFF tweaks? It is after all just a slimmed and optimized TFF. Toss in those tweaks and i'd think it would probably fly.
Cheers
Cheers
Good idea. I'll replace the default prefs.js with the one from my TFF installation. What version of TFF is Iceweasel forked from?@sparty411 What about IceWeaselPPC with those TFF tweaks? It is after all just a slimmed and optimized TFF. Toss in those tweaks and i'd think it would probably fly.
Cheers
I've considered shelling out for a new battery for my 15" DLSD, but I'm more interested in seeing whether or not I can just replace the cells in the battery packs I own. I've seen a youtube video by the 8-bit guy, (formerly ibook-guy)where he replaced the cells in a clamshell battery, and it seemed to work fine.Yes.
I'm currently on a 15" PowerBook DLSD, maxed out RAM and with an SSD, and I use it almost all of the time along with my Pismo G4 (upgrade courtesy of @LightBulbFun
There's nothing much I can't do, so I only use my MacBook Pro for iPhone backups and Messages, and any heavy video conversions.
Actually I'm waiting on a 2nd DLSD as a spare, and I've just bargained a brand new in the box genuine Apple battery for the PowerBooks (£20). It was still in the wrapper since 2004, flat of course, but it charged up fine
Cheers
Hugh
Edit:- Forgot to mention, PowerBook DLSD on Leopard; Pismo on Tiger
[doublepost=1562346763][/doublepost]
Okay, I replaced the default Iceweasel prefs.js file with the one from my TFF installation, and it does seem to be a fair bit quicker. The most noticeable thing, is the fact that it is using significantly less RAM, than TFF does, which is nice, because I'm swapping less to the HDD now. (It usually creates a ton of heat on the left palm rest where the drive is located).@sparty411 What about IceWeaselPPC with those TFF tweaks? It is after all just a slimmed and optimized TFF. Toss in those tweaks and i'd think it would probably fly.
Cheers
Browsing the web is nearly tolerable with TFF since @eyoungren and @z970mp convinced me to ditch NoScript for Umatrix
I've found that a neat little, often unknown trick is to full-screen TFF from its hamburger menu or with Cmd + Shft + F. When it hides the navigational bars, and stops rendering entirely the rest of the OS X desktop in the background, browsing hits faster speeds, often more immediately noticeable on notebooks.
Last edited:
As to the topic, yes. Maxxed out 15" DLSD, and DC 2GHz G5.
It makes the job quite a bit easier when you're quad-booting on your desktop between Tiger, Leopard, Ubuntu 16.04, and Debian 10, so you get as little compatibility issue as possible (did I mention there's a Windows VM on Tiger?) DLSD is currently dual-booting with Leopard and Debian 10.
I ought to add a dual-boot guide to the Wiki, if anyone would find use in one?
It makes the job quite a bit easier when you're quad-booting on your desktop between Tiger, Leopard, Ubuntu 16.04, and Debian 10, so you get as little compatibility issue as possible (did I mention there's a Windows VM on Tiger?) DLSD is currently dual-booting with Leopard and Debian 10.
I ought to add a dual-boot guide to the Wiki, if anyone would find use in one?
Last edited:
I, for one, would definitely be interested in a dual boot guide.
PowerMac G5 Quad. 16GB Ram, 2TB HD with 4TB secondary drive. Leopard 10.5.8
PowerMac G3 (as my server). 1GB Ram, 150GB HD, 2TB RAID vida eSATA to PCI SATA card, 1TB HD in dock via eSATA. Handles daily backups made by 4 Macs and TM backups. Tiger 10.4.11 Server.
*Note, the only increase I have ever seen for G5's hitting my bill has been $25 a month. That's with my Quad and 2.3DC on 24/7, both at full power (no sleep).
I live in Phoenix, so it's my AC that hits my electric bill - not my G5s.
I don’t use PPC as daily driver any more (simply not powerful enough) but I do still have PPC machines doing ‘stuff’ on a daily basis, it’s just behind the scenes stuff on headless boxes in a corner.
Sadly my daily driver used to be a G5 but swapped over in 2012 to an i7 mini, and a bunch of Mac Pro 4,1/5,1s depending on what needs doing.
Sadly my daily driver used to be a G5 but swapped over in 2012 to an i7 mini, and a bunch of Mac Pro 4,1/5,1s depending on what needs doing.
I bet that quad still holds up pretty well. I don't imagine it's more than 25-30 percent off of an Intel q6600, performance wise.
I don't use any PPC machines that I have as a daily driver just because they would be too slow to get pending stuff done. That does not however mean that I'm not using one of my PowerBook G4s in class in university for taking notes and recording lectures. Web browsing works sufficiently to a certain extent, i. e. when I need to look up vocabulary or an article on Wikipedia. But when I need to get stuff done quickly and I'm racing against the clock I hardly use PPC machines. My daily drivers (I'm switching between them frequently) are a MacBook Pro 13" Mid 2012, MacBook 13" Early 2009 and MacBook 13" Mid 2010. At home I use desktop machines most of the time, in my case an iMac 20" Mid 2007, Mac Mini Early 2009 and an iMac 24" Early 2009. Frankly I gotta admit that most of the time when I'm at home I could do almost all my daily tasks on my PowerMac G5 Late 2005 because it feels almost like an Intel Core 2 Duo in terms of speed. I even do work regularly on my PowerMac G5 but still I wouldn't consider it as my daily driver.
It does fairly well. I've got some niggling problems but mainly due to aging components and peripherals, not the Mac itself.
It handles six displays fairly well so I can't complain.
It doesn’t stack up badly against the old Core Quads or similar era Xeons, the problem is that they don’t stack up well to modern CPUs either.
Don’t get me wrong, I mean I have <500Mhz PPC kit still doing useful work, but if you actually need CPU power to get stuff done quickly choosing any decade+ old kit is a non-starter, even my Mac Pros are starting to creak and groan at times now.
For the ~200 odd Watts a G5 draws doing not much at all you can get 32+ cores of modern CPU, AND each of those cores will be a lot quicker.
I love my G5 though :-(
Last edited:
No, my DD is an early 2008 15" MBPro A1260 (silver keyboard) with OSX 10.11, 6GB RAM, USB 3.0-PCExpressCard and a 1TB SSD. Came at 100 bucks (but not maxed out as above).
I need an intel-Mac/OSX>10.5 specific VPN-protocol and new MS RemoteDesktop-Client for work and that MBP is my favorite device for watching streaming video and listening music, too - enhanced with a BassJump-subwoofer. Hope the full range of capabilities won't become obsolete too fast ...
Tried hard to achieve necessary VPN/RDP-performance with a PowerBookG4 without success.
My most often used PPC for regular tasks, beamer-companion, fax and leisure: 12" 1,5GHz and 15" 1,64GHz(DLSD) PowerBooks G4.
Last edited:
Therein lies the difference.
The only reason I have and continue to have PowerPC Macs as daily drivers is because my daily driver needs mainly consist of web browsing, email, some light word processing and maybe a few networking operations between Macs.
The Quad is used more extensively and primarily when I need to do something with graphic design. I have the latest versions of just about everything (QuarkXPress, InDesign) that you can run on PowerPC. But…with each passing year they age.
My work Mac is entirely different though. A year ago it was a 2010 MP Quad Core with 32GB ram. In my new job it's a mid-2015 MBP (which I am typing this on) that goes back and forth with me to work. So, for work purposes, that's what I'm using and I can use it for whatever at home. Generally I don't though.
I do have my own 2009 MBP though that when faced with the exact same circumstances you describe will compel me to use it.
That said, I rarely feel any deadline pressures when designing on my Quad. Adobe CS4 is more than fast enough. I have 16GB of ram, so using a 2GB ram drive as a scratch disk works really well. In any case, a PDF is a PDF and no one cares what computer/app produced it of what year as long as it's right.