I still use my G4, but personally I wish Apple would start a green initiative where they would sell you an Intel upgrade kit for G3-G5 Macs including chipset/cpu/gpu. If they included authorized store based upgrades, DIY packages and recycling service for discarded parts they could probably make a profit off of this and keep a lot of landfills less filled. I'm very close to trying to start a free forum to try pull people together and discuss this and plans to try to get it done. I'd love to try to maybe do something like making T-Shirts to specifically be worn at Apple trade events by various audience members to get attention. Something is better than nothing. Anyway let me know what you guys think.
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Intel Upgrades...
- Thread starter Imhotep397
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1 Massive Issue with this: Intel CPUs would require a new Motherboard/Logic board entirely as PowerPC and x86 are totally different architectures with totally different instruction sets. You cant stick an Intel CPU/GPU/Chipset in a PowerMac without going and doing a Hackintosh (The motherboard has to be replaced, as will the RAM and everything else except perhaps the HD and Optical Drives). Basically you want them to sell you an Intel upgrade - they already do, its called an Intel Mac. If they produced an upgrade kit it would cost as much as the equivalent current Intel Mac, so it isnt worth it, as theyd have to give you the entire Mac pretty much (Optical Drives, HD Drives and Cases arent that costly to manufacture - the rest all has to be replaced).
What is the difference between selling your machine and buying an Intel?
Put your machine on craigslist and then buy a new one.
Put your machine on craigslist and then buy a new one.
It would never happen. As already mentioned, it's impossible to install an Intel processor onto a PowerPC board, as the structure of the chipsets is completely different. Even an upgrade kit with a new logic board, processor and video card would be insanely expensive, probably $600-700; and at that price you could buy a new $699 Mac Mini that would last you for years.
Plus it's also a case of Apple losing money as no one would buy new computers from them, everyone would be upgrading their old setups at a cheaper cost.
EDIT - Also, Even if an "Intel upgrade" existed, you would have to take the system bus speed and memory speed as factors as well. A 167MHz bus speed and PC2700 memory would be an ENORMOUS bottleneck with any of the Intel processors offered in Macs.
Plus it's also a case of Apple losing money as no one would buy new computers from them, everyone would be upgrading their old setups at a cheaper cost.
EDIT - Also, Even if an "Intel upgrade" existed, you would have to take the system bus speed and memory speed as factors as well. A 167MHz bus speed and PC2700 memory would be an ENORMOUS bottleneck with any of the Intel processors offered in Macs.
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There are several ways to go green:
1. recycle your computer by selling it. The higher energy demands of the old power supply will, perhaps eliminate itself contra the production costs of a new computer (material + CO2 + chemical waste involved in the production process etc.. It is at least true for cars, the CO2 of an old car in several years is the same as the CO2 of a new car in production).
2. in terms of raw materials (how do you call platinum, copper, silicate, carbon etc. in general?), you can go green by giving your old computer to a recycler who extracts expensive things like copper, gold and platinum, which gets more and more short in the mines over the world and this makes it profitable to take it from old machines. I know a recycler who even pays for it, an AMD K6 for example gives you 1eur, an old SUN/IBM CPU with gold cap about 3-5eur, here.
3. sell it directly to apple. They have a program for it, but wwill give you like 10% of what you will get on ebay, they will do the same as the local recycler.
1. recycle your computer by selling it. The higher energy demands of the old power supply will, perhaps eliminate itself contra the production costs of a new computer (material + CO2 + chemical waste involved in the production process etc.. It is at least true for cars, the CO2 of an old car in several years is the same as the CO2 of a new car in production).
2. in terms of raw materials (how do you call platinum, copper, silicate, carbon etc. in general?), you can go green by giving your old computer to a recycler who extracts expensive things like copper, gold and platinum, which gets more and more short in the mines over the world and this makes it profitable to take it from old machines. I know a recycler who even pays for it, an AMD K6 for example gives you 1eur, an old SUN/IBM CPU with gold cap about 3-5eur, here.
3. sell it directly to apple. They have a program for it, but wwill give you like 10% of what you will get on ebay, they will do the same as the local recycler.
if you need intel but want to Keep your PowerMac G4 case , just hackintosh it
by now there are atx boards out there which take intel or amd processors and are nearly as easy to install osx on then it is on any original intel Mac and its a way cheaper option then even a mini and much more powerful and upgradable too
by now there are atx boards out there which take intel or amd processors and are nearly as easy to install osx on then it is on any original intel Mac and its a way cheaper option then even a mini and much more powerful and upgradable too
This is what it really comes down to. Cost, upgrade ability, AND being greener but I'd just rather do it legally, probably as would millions of others.
When I wrote "Chipset" meant "Motherboard" I just wanted to throw that out there. I find it highly unlikely that the power supplies made this year for desktops are much different from the power supplies made five years ago...in fact I'm certain of it. As far as power consumption it's just the components inside the computers that use less power. The point is I'd rather not go the Hackintosh route basically leave the port window in the back open since I'm sure the ports on a standard PC motherboard won't be in the same places and have to rip out the interior chipset mounting posts/risers and add new ones placed correctly to get an Intel board in there. I may end up doing that even if it's only to convert one of my old Macs into a modern Windoze PC.
It really would cost Apple relatively little to design and have their motherboard factories spit out Apple certified motherboards that fit the older Mac cases along with their MacPro/iMac motherboards or they could come up with adapter plates if necessary. I also feel like Apple and even Steve specifically are hypocritical when I keep hearing about how "Green" they are or how environmentally friendly the company is becoming when they aren't even considering ways to keep any of the millions and millions of non-aluminum pre-Intel Macs out of landfills. Creating an upgrade path for old Macs would build goodwill not only with PPC owners that have been abandoned, but also with the millions of Apple detractors that always berate Apple for their lack of a Mid-level products or strategy, it would also build good will with Hakintosh owners and with environmentalists.
The other issue is there are multitudes of websites that describe, in depth, how to build Hakcintoshes. There have even been articles written about the use of Hackintoshes in major magazines like FastCompany. It's no secret at this point that a chunk of the user base runs OS X on uncertified hardware and that's just ridiculous and completely unnecessary.
If you build a hackintosh you can upgrade it all you want
That statement makes no sense.Issues I can see with your plan:
1) When apple talks about being green their talking about their current product line and what they will do with them, noone at apple gives 2 hoots about a machine they shipped 5+ years ago.
2) It would be very difficult as the internal power supplies connectors have changed (to support SATA etc), and the ports on the G3s and G4s would cost too much to add (Apples Desktops no longer have FW400 or a Modem for instance, and no graphics card has ADC).
3) The iMacs mainboard isnt suitable for modification as its a specific weird shape for the iMacs case
4) The Mac Pros logicboard is too large to fit in a G3/G4 without a redesign, especially with the CPU board which is attached onto the Mainboard (Its no longer 1 board)
5) The G4s cases in general have a lot less cooling capacity, so would need louder fans to fit them in
6) The whole idea is silly when Apple wants you to buy a new Mac as its more profit for them, they dont really care about users goodwill
Apple tolerates personal hackintoshes, but they are not going to do anything to help them. There have been companies that tried to build and sell hackintoshes and Apple jumped on them quickly and put them out of business. Apple is a hardware company and there is no reason for them to care if OSx can be run on anything other than genuine Apple machines, in fact it is to Apple's advantage to make sure it is not too easy for OSx to be installed on a hackintosh. Apple is not concerned about products that they built 5+ years ago.
Apple does not have any motherboard factories either; they have no factories at all - Apple designs stuff and other companies build them. It is not economical for Apple (or anyone else) to actually build their own motherboards from scratch. Apple doesn't build CPUs, or RAM, or HDDs, or optical drives or even keyboards.
I know how Apple's hardware design to manufacturing process works...that's why I added that it would be fairly simple for them to shoot off a motherboard design to whomever they have building their boards and then resell those for a profit just like they sell iPods, iPads, other Macs or accessories. They have the physical schematics of all the computers they have ever shipped so it would be a simple matter of someone spending, probably less than a day to retro-design an Intel desktop proc motherboard and even power supplies for two or three PPC Mac cases to see how they would sell first.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of PPC Mac owners that want a computer that's upgradable (disqualifies the iMac and Mac mini) but they don't have +$2400 to hand Apple for a Mac Pro...granted many people are moving to to mobile computing, but there are still millions of actual Mac users that would love to continue to use Macs but are forced over to Windows out of necessity and practicality. These are people that Apple is getting jack squat from at this point as far as computer purchases. If Apple were to make a Mid Tower for around $1k that would do the trick as well, but as I mentioned that wouldn't the greenest way to go considering a lot of the plastic stuff Apple built prior to the Intel era doesn't break down into useful materials for the purposes of recycling.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of PPC Mac owners that want a computer that's upgradable (disqualifies the iMac and Mac mini) but they don't have +$2400 to hand Apple for a Mac Pro...granted many people are moving to to mobile computing, but there are still millions of actual Mac users that would love to continue to use Macs but are forced over to Windows out of necessity and practicality. These are people that Apple is getting jack squat from at this point as far as computer purchases. If Apple were to make a Mid Tower for around $1k that would do the trick as well, but as I mentioned that wouldn't the greenest way to go considering a lot of the plastic stuff Apple built prior to the Intel era doesn't break down into useful materials for the purposes of recycling.
Apple wouldn't have to "Tolerate" Hackintoshes if the actually payed attention the that couple million that have either already built Hackintosh or are thinking about building one. My guess is that retrofitting would double the number of active Mac users and that can only help Apple in the long run.
There's a blasphemy in first words of your original post...
Intel is Satan, don't you know?
http://www.motherboardpoint.com/intel-evil-create-cpus-satan-t62299.html
Intel is Satan, don't you know?
http://www.motherboardpoint.com/intel-evil-create-cpus-satan-t62299.html
Ridiculous idea.
So you basically want apple to sell you an entirely new computer that you could house inside of your G4 shell.
Because the only component that you could(and I'm not even sure if its just IDE and you could use a SATA to IDE converter or if its something proprietary) or would even want to salvage is the optical drive.
Good luck with that.
They were IDE, but now SATA is used and a converter isnt simple enough to be an Apple Solution. Next he'll suggest they should make an Intel board for the Mac 128K....
They were IDE, but now SATA is used and a converter isnt simple enough to be an Apple Solution. Next he'll suggest they should make an Intel board for the Mac 128K....
Apple won't sell non-xeon mac pros for people who actually want decent video cards and some level of expandability but don't need ECC ram or the thousand dollar price premium that the xeon carries along with it.
Yet this guy wants a multi-million dollar engineering solution for something that a couple dozen customers would be interested in, max.
Some of the people on this forum are too kind to dumb users.
Would it be nice if apple just said "keep your g3 powermac case and well fill it up with intel parts for 1000 dollars"? Of course, and then sony can make a custom lcd tv to fit in my old console set. I would love an intel board that fit in my ibook for less than a macbook but that would make no sense for apple. Macs are very expensive. They were expensive when your g4 came out. You knew what they charged when you went mac. Because of their prices a lot of mac users keep their computers longer than pc users. If you cant afford a new mac every few years like a lot of us cant, yet you need the latest technology then macs arent for you.
Have you any proof that there are indeed millions of hackintoshes? They get no support from Apple, they cannot be sold commercially, so where are the numbers?
Doubling the number of active Mac users would not help Apple if they were using hackintoshes. Apple is concerned with selling computers that run OSx, not selling copies of OSx to run on non-Apple machines. Apple nearly went bankrupt last time they tried to license the OS.
Exactly, and you just have to deal with it. Putting Intel chips in things like an iBook is dangerous anyway, and it's probably a reason why they haven't brought the clamshell with handle back. It would get crazily hot in there, and the faster the fans are, the more likely OS X will crash. Things would just start melting after a few months too.
Mid-Towers would be the only reasonable candidates for something like this as laptops just were never intended to be majorly upgraded and iMacs have case dimensions that are too radically different to put any standard parts in them. There are so many variations on the Intel motherboard design that I'm certain there's at least one or two designs that already are 98% compliant with motherboard requirements that these machines would have. At most you're talking about turning a port sideways or moving it an inch to the left or something trivial like that which can be fabricated very easily. PowerMac G3s/PowerMac 9600s use the same case, all G4 mid-towers use the same case and G5s us the same case as Mac Pros, so no alteration there is necessary. Apple can only help themselves by offering a PC price competitive desktop solution regardless of what form it enters the market.
While all of you guys are blowing hot air about how ridiculous an idea this is had you even stopped to consider how much cheaper it would be for Apple to produce a motherboard package for an already existing Midtower than to design, build, promote and deliver a new MidTower? Certainly Apple has stepped away from the Midtower business, but I personally know of quite a few publishers, newspaper/magazine that have moved copy editors away from Macs because Mac Pros and iMacs were prohibitively expensive and Mac minis were not expandable making them to feel insecure about buying reasonably priced future proof hardware. Apple has grown in other areas, but these are places that were all PC not that long ago and could switch back at the drop of a dime. (or at the expiration of a lease)
While all of you guys are blowing hot air about how ridiculous an idea this is had you even stopped to consider how much cheaper it would be for Apple to produce a motherboard package for an already existing Midtower than to design, build, promote and deliver a new MidTower? Certainly Apple has stepped away from the Midtower business, but I personally know of quite a few publishers, newspaper/magazine that have moved copy editors away from Macs because Mac Pros and iMacs were prohibitively expensive and Mac minis were not expandable making them to feel insecure about buying reasonably priced future proof hardware. Apple has grown in other areas, but these are places that were all PC not that long ago and could switch back at the drop of a dime. (or at the expiration of a lease)
The problem is that you dont grasp basic hardware design. What your suggesting isnt in any way cheaper than a new Mac. Your understanding of the cost of moving components is not only wrong, but incredibly wrong. What were telling you is that your idea is just plain stupid, from economic, time and support perspectives. There is no "drop in" solution, because creating one costs a hellva lot more than you seem able to comprehend. Lets look at the problems you fail to notice:
1) The PSU in G3s and G4s isnt powerful enough to drive modern CPUs and modern motherboards at any reasonable CPU speed and use modern graphics, expansion cards. (For instance I have a 980W ( I think, it might be more than that, its certainly not less) PSU in my expandable Mac Pro to let it power modern graphics and expansion cards, my G4 MDD has a 400W PSU).
2) Half the ports have changed, and youd need a different motherboard for each iteration of G3/G4 because of differences in motherboard mouting, size and port placement, so theyd need to make 6 boards (G3 Beige, G3/G4 PCI, G4 AGP, G4 DA, G4QS and G4 MDD)
3) G4s cases are all very different, they even differ in the number and location of PCI slots between models, as well as cooling solutions, so youd need a different board per model as already mentioned (MDD has its PCI slots at the top, whereas a G4 AGP has them at the bottom, the AGP also has 1 less PCI than the DA/QS/MDD models). The G5 and Mac Pros cases are incredibly different inside - they dont have the same layout, at all, due to the massively different cooling requirements of the G5 and the Intel Xeon chips - heck the Mac Pros internal layout has changed between the Mac Pro 1,1 and Mac Pro 5,1. (G5 has HDDs in the top and PSU on the bottom, with the CPUs sat on top of the PSU, Mac Pros have the HDDs in the middle, PSU at the top and CPUs right at the bottom) - and the G3 and 9600 dont have the same case at all - the G3 has 3 PCI slots, and the 9600 has 6 of them - massive difference. Just because they look similar on the outside doesnt mean they are in anyway related on the inside.
What Im saying is that its not hot air what we have attempted to tell you, its the truth, and if you dont like it, well tough, because there is no way of altering it to fit some fantasy of Apple offering upgrades to Intel CPUs for 5 - 14/15 year old machines.
Even if this was cost effective some how, the number of apple users is going up with the way things are. So they must not be losing that many customers. I think apple should use standard sized boards to make all of our lives easier, itll never happen but it would be nice. Releasing boards to fit 10 year old cases has even less of chance.
The thing is, if Apple was using Standard sized boards, their machines would end up as noisy and boxy as everything else (Because with standard size comes standard CPU and connector placement - which would make the insides a complete mess) - Personally I want them to continue making very quiet machines with bespoke boards and with an internal design that means I dont have to spend ages figuring out which wire goes where. It also has the happy side effect of preventing people performing the most legitimate hackintosh without difficulty (Think about it - standard boards means you could replace them with a PC board, something Apple is incredibly interested in preventing, because theyve probably worked out the hackintoshes in Apple original cases are the most difficult to litigate against - since they are inherently Apple Branded via the case (It doesnt say Apple internals in their license agreement)), the reason I like this side effect is it keeps hackintoshing from becoming common outside the geek community, meaning Apple has a hope in hell of surviving (The clone debacle of 1997 would happen again and probably faster today than it did then if Apple allowed them - admittedly Apple now has more revenue streams and billions in cash, but it would still start to destroy their OS business, and us legitimate Mac owners with Intels would be left without a new OS...)