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Price Advice Realistic price for Power Mac G3 AIO with defect?

E

everett1911

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 4, 2017
39
16
Montreal, Canada
So I've verified the condition of my Power Mac G3 all in one and there's two things to note:

1) There's a very few small cracks on top of the machine, where the plastic with the small holes is, from all the junk that was on top of it when I found it. No broken off pieces though.

2) There's a strange issue which I assume is related to the power supply OR capacitors, where a small crackle will be heard once in a while and the machine will reboot on its own, as if it lost power for a brief moment. (It most likely was dust, the issue hasn't happened in almost a full day of leaving the machine running and there is no more crackling.)

Everything else functions though, and I could even get on sites like macintosh repository (couldn't download anything though, due to IE 4 and Netscape 4.5 being completely obsolete) and low end mac, and the A/V card works as intended (I played a few xbox games through it. quality ain't great but for 1998 that's alright). There's the stock cd-rom drive and 4gb hard disk and scsi zip 100 drive plus Mac OS 9, and has 96mb of ram and the 266mhz G3 cpu.

Honestly the machine takes space in my already small apartment (It's right next to my bulky Compaq Portable 286) and I don't have the confidence to mess around with the power supply or capacitors so I'm thinking of selling it, and I was wondering if 200 dollars CAD (since I live in canada and sadly I can't ship it because it'd probably cost me more than I'd get-- that's a 60 pound-heavy machine) was an appropriate price for a machine that's still rare and works but needs a few fixes.

(200cad would be roughly 157 dollars USD)
 
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AFAIK these weren't available everywhere - certainly not in Aus. Given their rarity here, I'd probably pay the AU$207 equivalent.

Shipping would kill it for me so it's out of the question, but I'd still love to have one. Since I never see them here, I can't really assist with it's value in Canada.

However, I suspect the high voltage output arcing is the cause of the problem, due to dust accumulation, cracked solder joints on the Flyback Transformer and/or surrounding components, or a failing FlyBack Transformer - could even be a bad earth on the chassis somewhere.

Sad to see it go, but I hear these things are a beast when up close. Good luck!
 
MacTech68 said:
AFAIK these weren't available everywhere - certainly not in Aus. Given their rarity here, I'd probably pay the AU$207 equivalent.

Shipping would kill it for me so it's out of the question, but I'd still love to have one. Since I never see them here, I can't really assist with it's value in Canada.

However, I suspect the high voltage output arcing is the cause of the problem, due to dust accumulation, cracked solder joints on the Flyback Transformer and/or surrounding components, or a failing FlyBack Transformer - could even be a bad earth on the chassis somewhere.

Sad to see it go, but I hear these things are a beast when up close. Good luck!
Click to expand...
From what lowendmac says they were only sold in north america

And I once checked shipping for australia a few months ago for giggles and it was like 400 dollars for shipping alone, it was crazy D:
 
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Is there a program that would fit on a floppy or a built-in command or program that shows the current uptime in Mac OS 9? I've been keeping the macintosh running (with my xbox serving as a makeshift screensaver via Apple Video Player (and switching to 640x480 to get full-screen with it) and it's been almost a day and it hasn't restarted once-- the last few days had been spent with it in sleep mode before I disabled sleep mode. There is no more random crackles so it probably WAS dust that caused the machine to reboot and that's a pain that'd be dealt with but I'd want to have a proof to show to a prospective buyer.
 
IIRC Techtool v1.2.1 (free version) would do this, but only presents hours of use, rather than up-time between restarts. Resets by clearing PRAM.

https://www.micromat.com/component/k2/item/285-techtool-121

TechTool 1.2.1 Hrs of Use.png
 
AIOs are difficult to price.

On one hand, they are relatively scarce even in the US(even though I remember seeing a fair few around my high school, I suspect that a lot went to scrap). On the other hand, they have some downsides. They're a bit of a niche product. For someone who collects beige G3s(I do) you have to have one. On the other hand, they ARE a beige G3 PowerMac(the LoBo is the same as the desktop and mintower). Still, the stock GPUs aren't great and, unlike a desktop/tower upgrading the GPU isn't straight forward.

Also, they are big and heavy(they are more manageable than eMacs) and no one in their right mind will ship one. It WILL cost a fortune and it WILL arrive broken-I've never had a Mac from this era arrive without at least some broken plastic.

When I bought mine, I paid the seller $125. That included the AIO, an LC/monitor, and a mind boggling number of boxes of "stuff." The "stuff" included a bunch of beige case parts(a lot NOS, some from tear downs), some other parts from both beige and G4 towers, and some legitimately rare aftermarket upgrade parts. The seller was glad to be rid of it.

I've since seen some advertised semi-locally in the $50-100 range, but have passed because I don't have the need or space, and didn't care to go get them.

BTW, mine's a fun OS 9 computer with 500mhz Sonnet G4 in it along with a USB/FW card and 10/100 ethernet card. It's decent on the internet with Classilla. I've never gotten around to installing Leopard, and if I did that I'd want to fit an ATA card(these have the quirk inherent in HDD controller OWR systems where OS X must be installed a partition in the first 8gb of the drive, a space that's way too tight for Leopard-bootable ATA cards allow you to both bypass this and also enable support for drives larger than 128gb). As of now, mine only has 10.2.8. BTW, I ran it for a little while on a Yikes! G4 card, but it was SUPER buggy with that-aftermarket CPUs are the way to go if you want a G4 or fast G3.

One last thing-I bought a Bordeaux card with the intent of installing it to make a nifty self-contained DVD player, but the video out on these passes through the personality card and Bordeaux cards lack these pass throughs. The Bordeaux ended up in the 1ghz G4 minitower I have at work.
 
bunnspecial said:
AIOs are difficult to price.

On one hand, they are relatively scarce even in the US(even though I remember seeing a fair few around my high school, I suspect that a lot went to scrap). On the other hand, they have some downsides. They're a bit of a niche product. For someone who collects beige G3s(I do) you have to have one. On the other hand, they ARE a beige G3 PowerMac(the LoBo is the same as the desktop and mintower). Still, the stock GPUs aren't great and, unlike a desktop/tower upgrading the GPU isn't straight forward.

Also, they are big and heavy(they are more manageable than eMacs) and no one in their right mind will ship one. It WILL cost a fortune and it WILL arrive broken-I've never had a Mac from this era arrive without at least some broken plastic.

When I bought mine, I paid the seller $125. That included the AIO, an LC/monitor, and a mind boggling number of boxes of "stuff." The "stuff" included a bunch of beige case parts(a lot NOS, some from tear downs), some other parts from both beige and G4 towers, and some legitimately rare aftermarket upgrade parts. The seller was glad to be rid of it.

I've since seen some advertised semi-locally in the $50-100 range, but have passed because I don't have the need or space, and didn't care to go get them.

BTW, mine's a fun OS 9 computer with 500mhz Sonnet G4 in it along with a USB/FW card and 10/100 ethernet card. It's decent on the internet with Classilla. I've never gotten around to installing Leopard, and if I did that I'd want to fit an ATA card(these have the quirk inherent in HDD controller OWR systems where OS X must be installed a partition in the first 8gb of the drive, a space that's way too tight for Leopard-bootable ATA cards allow you to both bypass this and also enable support for drives larger than 128gb). As of now, mine only has 10.2.8. BTW, I ran it for a little while on a Yikes! G4 card, but it was SUPER buggy with that-aftermarket CPUs are the way to go if you want a G4 or fast G3.

One last thing-I bought a Bordeaux card with the intent of installing it to make a nifty self-contained DVD player, but the video out on these passes through the personality card and Bordeaux cards lack these pass throughs. The Bordeaux ended up in the 1ghz G4 minitower I have at work.
Click to expand...

Hm, I do have a Macintosh Portrait Display I could bundle it with but I never got to test it because I don't have the weirdo video cable it requires.
 
bunnspecial said:
It's a shame you're not closer.

I've been looking for one of those...and I have the correct 13W3 cable along with the card for it. I'd buy both from you...
Click to expand...
Knowing my luck I won't find any buyer on kijiji so if you ever happen to be around (or if you take the 14 hour-ish car trip google maps says it'd take from the state of kentucky to where I am) I would sell the AIO and give the monitor with it.
 
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