I'm less concerned with living in the past and more concerned with 7 year old parts breaking down. When that happens, you waste money by investing in old technology. If he can survive for years on an old G4 Powermac, just imagine how long he'll survive on even the base mac mini. And it's not like he'd be paying much more.
If you say so. I don't think you gave much thought to what people might be using a used PowerMac for, though. For example, if you want an household NAS/iTunes server that can also be used as a 3rd location for listening to music and watching movies in a den and secure shopping/banking (what I use mine for), you might get a dual 533 DA one for example for $50-200 ($300-450 outfitted with two screaming fast 1TB Sata drives) and then compare that with a $800-900 base Mac-Mini that uses laptop parts (i.e. insanely slow except for the CPU) and that Mac Mini would STILL need external hard drives to be used as a server since its internal hard drive is both slow and tiny and therefore useless in that environment except for booting OS X. So you then have to add the price of two external hard drives (one to back the other one up) and that would bring the Mini into the $1050-1200 range. For $90, I could add (and did add) an ATI 9800Pro, which I believe is faster than the Intel GPU included in the Mini and has dual-head output. Throw in $20 for a USB 2.0 card and $30 for an 18x DVD-RW drive and you have an iTunes server/burner/docking station for around $400-550 TOTAL. That's not even a bad price for dedicated NAS unit and none of them out there except maybe the HP Media-Smart (running the Windows version of iTunes directly) can serve AppleTV units because they need to run a full version of iTunes.
So assuming your interest is purely an iTunes server system and NAS with the ability to also do secure shopping/browsing and even word processing, etc., an upgraded used PowerMac will do the job nicely and without loads of external junk cluttering up your desk for around $400-450 versus a Mac Mini which outfitted with the same 1TB of backed up storage externally would run you $1050-1200. In short, you'd be paying 1/3 the price and it'd also be less clutter and you could even drive two monitors if you so chose. With a $70 Elgato .H264 Turbo added, it could even encode movies for AppleTV faster than a brand new MBP running Handbrake.
I also added a 1.8GHz 7448 G4 to mine for an additional $400, which enables it to run pretty much any reasonable productivity software out there. But then I have a MBP for video editing and portable sound studio applications. The PowerMac is a base station terminal and network server connected to a high speed Gigabit and dual 802.11N home network along with a PC running XP and Linux and two AppleTVs and an iPod Touch. I connected Klipsch THX 2.1 speakers to the PowerMac and it also doubles as a den stereo and movie station (I have over 250 DVDs, 256 music videos and 5500+ songs in my iTunes library that it serves around the house to the two AppleTVs, my MBP laptop and XP/Linux PC).
Not to mention he'd get a machine that can handle youtube just fine, and even hulu high quality streams without a hiccup. The latter is pretty impossible on any G4 except maybe MDD (haven't tested) or those with upgraded CPUs (which in themselves are overpriced). I know, I've tried.
My PowerMac setup with a 1.8GHZ 7448 G4 would run about $800 with the above video/usb/storage options. That's still $250-400 less than a Mini with equivalent external storage running at a much slower hard drive rate (FW400 or USB 2.0 which top out around 25-30MB/sec versus internal Sata on my PowerMacwhich gets me over 80MB/sec). I can also easily add a Firewire 800 PCI card or even an eSata card for under $50. No such options exist for a Mini. It's limited to FW400 and USB 2.0 only forever. If I needed 802.11N, it's a $40 PCI or USB 2.0 card away. If I want a Blu-Ray drive to burn 50GB discs (for whatever reason), I can easily replace my DVD-RW drive with one. I've still got 2 empty PCI card slots left and room for 3 more internal hard drives (one 4-port sata card away). My brand new MBP can't rip DVDs even half as fast as this PowerMac's 20x DVD-RW drive and with an Elgato added, it can't encode them as fast either.
If your Mac-Mini dies after the 1 year warranty, you're SOL. You have to spend another $800-900 to replace it. Or you can spend a LOT extra for AppleCare. Whereas If I had any kind of hardware failure on my PowerMac server, I'd just buy another used PowerMac for $50 and move all the upgrades over to it. There's not much risk there.
And balls to resale value. I paid $300 for a quicksilver 2001 in 2006, and after upgrades I easily could've bought a mac mini that would've lasted me much longer.
When you pay $50 for a PowerMac, you don't worry about resale value.
Truth be told, investing in anything less than an Intel mac at this point (and arugably the core solo mac mini) is a waste of money. Why pay a premium
for old, obsolete technology when you can pay a little more for a brand new machine? And I realize not every one has the funds, and might want to get
For the above reasons. Not all of us use just one computer (like I said, I have a new MBP and a PC as well) and a Mini doesn't make a very good server, IMO when I do it for 1/3 the price with a used PowerMac. It can also run Tiger, Leopard and even hard boot OS9 all on the same machine (nice if you like to run older software for some reason).
You could also use a PC as a server and do it for even less, but then you're running Windows. I leave my PowerMac on 24/7 and it almost never needs a reboot.
, so paying a shade over a quarter of that price for a machine that could still last several years isn't that bad.