As if I need to elaborate…
Well, others of note are models of remarkable backward and forward compatibility.
The
Power Macintosh 9600 is one such model. It was able to take on six PCI cards and 1.5GB RAM at a time when that was nigh-unheard of in a Mac.
I’m going to be kind of a troll and include a “Mystic”
Macintosh Color Classic “III” with PowerPC card to this list, because I love how extra that is.
Another (please hear me out on this one!) are the
final PowerBook G4s — especially the final 17-inch.
Though stopped in their OS X tracks by Apple, post-Leopard, they can still run current variants of Linux (ok, Debian sid, Void, and maybe only a handful of others) and MorphOS in 2023. For a technical angle, they were the only series whose both form factors — 15 and 17 (sorry, 12-inch, you’re an aluminium iBook G4) —
came equipped with S/PDIF optical input/output in the mini headphone port. They had FW800 and FW400; a PCMCIA slot (making legacy, SCSI support and later, AirPort-compliant 802.11n wifi possible); a means to run faster, next-gen PC2 RAM; and high-res displays which remained standard Mac laptop resolutions until the Unibody MBPs went on sale. They inherited the mantle of the 2003 models which were first to have backlit keyboards on a laptop and were the first place where Apple began testing post-iBook/PowerBook
portable power adapter sockets in what would evolve into MagSafe. They could still run OS 9 in Classic mode. They could burn DVDs. They were equipped with dual-link DVI ports, ample VRAM for the day, and an ability to run high-res displays like the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display. They were designed for a CPU capable of dynamic frequency modes (not unlike the later, more advanced turbo boost modes of Core iX Macs). The only thing they lacked was a 64-bit CPU.
The
Dual Core 2.3 Power Mac G5 is another I love, and amazingly, one I still don’t have. It hits the sweet spot of the multi-core series, with a logic board on par with the Quad Core, but without being overhyped, overpriced, and overheated. As with all G5s, it’s less backward/forward-compatible than the G4, but still has a lot of still-contemporary features like PCIe and SATA, out of box.
And although not faves, honourable mentions go to the
G4 Cube, for being a kind of test-run for the Mac mini, and the
iBook G3/900, for being the one place where the rock-stable G3 CPU moved at its quickest (even if GPU issues plagued the series).
For me, the King of the PPC Macs has been, and always will be the pre-ADC Sawtooth G4s, even including the infamous Yikes! models.
They were infamous for very good reason: they were rushed, monster-of-Frankenstein dogs which had no business being sold as OEM. They didn’t even have the legacy ADB port of the Yosemite, despite being in almost every other way a Yosemite.
My first Mac was a Yikes! in late October 1999, just after the infamous downclock scandal (on which I got stung). By late November 1999, the logic board had to be replaced by a local Apple authorized repair centre, under warranty (not even AppleCare warranty, which I bought), because audio output up and dropped out on one channel without warning. I managed maybe four years of daily use before the logic board began having a peppering of other issues and quirks — I/O issues with the PATA bus being one of them. I did, at least, get some use of OS X on it — Panther — but had long since stopped using it by the time Tiger came around.
By 2004, I had given up on trying to make fetch happen — no, not the ftp utility — and bought a used, 366MHz indigo iBook G3 to take over as my daily driver, for the then-“bargain” of USD$400. For what was a marginal bump-up in clock speed, even in absence of AltiVec, and a loss of my 19-inch CRT, I got portability, wifi, and the ability to run Tiger without a hitch. That would carry me through my first year in undergrad and continue to get sporadic use by the time the key lime I still run daily showed up in my life the following year (2007) — also for about USD$365, almost the same price as the indigo three years earlier (oh, that key lime premium).
I think my feelings about the first run of G4s would have gone very, very differently had I budgeted instead for the mid-level Sawtooth, which ended up having the targeted clock speed of the 400MHz Yikes! (Yikesemite?) I had ordered just days prior to the downclock scandal.
