No problem! Serial number is XB9490RPHPO
Don't mind the plastic, I have the system in storage right now.
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.
Power "Macintosh" G4
- Thread starter lepidotós
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Don't mind the plastic, I have the system in storage right now.
They are both nice machines, and in a way, the B&W is the same experience as a Yikes, while the Gigabit dual is the same experience as using a fast Sawtooth.
I like the Sawtooth more, but only for cosmetic reasons. You may want to get one if you're a collection completionist.
Oh @Certificate of Excellence , forgot to mention the Sawtooth's one unique advantage – internal Firewire 400. But it's really not useful in 99% of cases.
Ah yes. The oddball internal FireWire port. I remember it well as one of the Sawtooth’s idiosyncrasies and leaving me to wonder whether having it was worth moving up to the middle tier 450MHz (later, 400MHz). Admittedly, I lacked foresight on AGP being a thing for the next half-decade.
But even then, I couldn’t find a product for sale whose use-case would require an internal FireWire port. Take MacWarehouse (hat tip: Vintage Apple), which is from where I bought everything I’d need for my Yikes! G4 (ordered, BTO, separately, from Apple) — including that FireWire 4x4x16 CD-RW (which shipped in a translucent clear and bondi blue teal enclosure):
It’s almost as if an internal FireWire port was being market-tested with the Sawtooth Power Mac as a kind of stopgap predecessor for future internal SATA ports — in which a hard drive itself would be equipped with a FireWire interface (never happened, as far as I know), or a SCSI/PATA drive connected via compact FireWire bridge (without enclosure) as the intended use for that internal FireWire port.
At that time, late 1999, all products with IEEE1394 were, basically, either external hard drives, external CD/DVD burners, or digital video cameras — all needing external FireWire ports.
Also, here… enjoy the cover page for the same catalogue issue from above: still with 400/450/500 options.
IIRC, FireWire 400 was being positioned as a replacement for SCSI on the Mac, much like how USB effectively replaced the ADB and Serial ports...so instead of an internal SCSI bus for the Sawtooth, you had an internal FireWire bus.
The internal FireWire port was a real tragedy on the Sawtooth. One of the first things I did when my family got our 400 Mhz Sawtooth was open up the case, and I was genuinely excited for what that internal connector would bring. After all, if Mac upgrade companies could put a Voodoo 2 in an Bondi Blue iMac G3, surely they'd come up with something cool for the Sawtooth's internal FireWire port. Alas, nothing.
The only genuinely useful purpose I ever saw that port get used for was a replacement for one of the external FireWire ports on one person's Sawtooth when they'd burned out. I never came up with a reason to use the port on my machine. I'd briefly considered mounting a used VST bus-powered 2.5" FireWire hard drive on the inside of my Sawtooth, when a computer parts store had been selling those drives as hollowed out drive enclosures. But by then I'd heard about how bus-powered FireWire 400 devices had a nasty habit of potentially frying FireWire ports on their host machines.
I'd read about how Apple had been expecting vendors to ship internal hard drives with FireWire connectors on them, but that never came to pass. I can't help but feel like Apple's tight grip on the licensing for the FireWire name played in a big part in it never becoming the widely adopted standard that people hoped it would.
Last edited:
True, but to be fair that could be remedied with either a new GPU or a passive adapter. I've never used that specific design of monitor either, but all the flat panel ones I've used have had detachable cables as well that you could use to switch out your connector if they were compatible passively, so it could be as easy as just grabbing a VGA cable and swapping it out.
Apple’s DVI LCDs were digital-only. If your system only had VGA, you were out of luck and needed a new GPU.
Last edited:
Last edited:
Well. That's certainly...something. Some Googling showed me that someone bought a used unit off of eBay for $600 in 2005, so I can only imagine how much it would have cost when it was released.
And if I'm reading the brochure correctly, it seems like you would have had to connect the drive to a separate video capture card.
I distinctly remember seeing this and thinking “That much for a non-working one — no way!” I kinda wish I'd snagged it just for the novelty though
I’m quite sure that refers to a FireWire card. The brochure is from 1998. Back then, only a few Sony laptops had FireWire OOTB.
Last edited:
True for the Cinema Display, but I don't recall the DVI Studio Display ever being model-locked, which may have caused compatibility problems.
Yeah, but it’s business as usual: Check if that fancy new display is going to work with your Mac before pulling the trigger. When ADC came in June 2000, “old” Macs were also left out in the cold.
As a funny sidenote, early (i.e. 1999/2000) DVI cards for PCs are basically impossible to find these days presumably because very few people bought them. At least G4s did come with DVI OOTB as early as December 1999.
Last edited:
Judging from the P3/P4 era PCs I've seen, and the heavy use of CRTs up until about 2005, I recall that VGA was the unbreakable standard up until the late 00s. My Compaq Presario 5000 tower from 2001(?) uses an integrated AGP GPU, but only VGA-out.
I think many gamers may have skipped DVI entirely and gone straight from VGA to HDMI. Perhaps DVI would've had a better early market share if Apple hadn't attempted the ADC route?
It didn’t help that early LCDs didn’t hold a candle next to a high-end CRT. And it didn’t help that manufacturers insisted on putting VGA inputs on LCDs either.
Digital outputs on integrated GPUs didn't become a thing until… way too late.
Quite possibly.
Last edited:
Evidently Apple tried to hide/deny the existence of the alternative G4 naming scheme. Here is the list of supported computers in Mac OS X Puma's install CD:
Welp, my mind is totally blown. That might be the only use-case product out there — unless Sony made a handful of other 5.25-inch bay devices beyond the DVcam.
Whatever the case, having one of these for that internal connection would be nifty when troubleshooting.
They're not THAT hard to find. I see plenty of Radeon 7000s (the original original) with DVI on eBay for not too much. We had one with DVI back then too. Of course we weren't USING the DVI port until years later when flat panel LCDs with multiple inputs became a thing.
The Radeon 7000 wasn't released until 2001, so I think that's 1-2 years later than what @Amethyst1 was discussing. Early DVI cards are very rare.
It's a rebrand of the RV100, I guess looking back at the release date it's about 2 months off from being a 2000 card. I thought it launched closer to the R100 but I guess not.
I have one too. Too new.
Yup. Think ATI Rage 128 Pro (the PC version!) or Radeon SDR/DDR, Matrox G400 with DVI add-on, Nvidia Riva TNT2, GeForce 256, or GeForce2, S3 Savage4.
Last edited:
Developer Preview 2's documentation, created October 12th, 1999, also says "Power Mac G4". So it seems the alternative name was never supposed to make it out the door (past that date, at least).
Last edited:
interesting little discussion on the go here! my Sawtooth is a pretty early one from the 45th week 1999, however it says Power Mac G4 yet later Sawtooths (Sawteeth?) shown in this thread still say Power Macintosh G4, however mine is an Cork made machine and I have to wonder if there is a local/factory difference at play here?
Brilliant. This is what we get when we have hard data rather than speculation.
So the naming isn't based on date or model (Sawtooth/Yikes), but we can infer the following based on current knowledge:
1) All Yikes G4s are called "Macintosh"
2) Some 1999 Sawtooths are called "Macintosh" (no data to suggest any in early 2000).
3) Manufacture location doesn't seem to affect naming (i.e. two Sawtooths made in Ireland around the same time had different names)
4) SKU doesn't might not matter either- there are 450mhz & 350mhz "Macintosh"es.
Last edited:
just to add to the mix, some idle ebay browsing coughed up this British market sawtooth just a couple weeks later then mine that says Power Macintosh
so it seems there was a right mix, or certainly some overlap between old and new name plates, and I guess the question becomes now, who has the Earliest Power Mac machine and latest Power Macintosh machine, for a given factory etc?