I have a slightly older Power Mac G4, a 350MHz "Yikes!" PCI Power Mac G4 from 1999 (https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/) that I purchased in 2009 for $40 while I was a senior at Cal Poly. The reason I got it for only $40 was because it had a broken hard drive, but the sellers didn't know that. I was able to replace the hard drive with one that was given away by Cal Poly's computer science department, which sometimes gave away old computer parts. I also replaced the non-working optical drive with a new DVD+RW drive, and I upgraded the RAM; IIRC, it has 640MB RAM.
Even though the computer was already obsolete in 2009 (I used a 2006 Core Duo MacBook as my daily driver, which ran circles around the old Power Mac G4), it was a capable machine that could run Mac OS X Leopard and could handle the Web of that era, even YouTube videos. Eventually, sometime around 2013 the Web became too much for my Power Mac G4, but it remains a very nice machine for Mac OS 9 and early Mac OS X retrocomputing. I now have faster PowerPC Macs in my collection (a 1GHz PowerBook G4 and a 1.25GHz Mac Mini G4), but my Power Mac G4 is the fastest machine in my collection that could run the classic Mac OS without any modifications, and it is also the fastest Mac in my collection that has expansion slots.
I'm keeping an eye on 2019 Mac Pro prices (I own a 2013 Mac Pro, which I purchased refurbished in 2017 and used as my daily driver until 2022, when I switched to a Ryzen 3900 build). I love the aesthetic, but they're pricey since they are still quite capable Macs despite the transition to ARM. Once they drop to under $500, I plan to buy one and add it to my collection.
Update: I found my old blog post about my Power Mac G4: https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-power-mac-...
I also have a "trash can" mac, and I'm not sure what to do with it.
It runs linux great, and with 12 cores, 32G of RAM- it could be an extremely capable server. If not for the minuscule SSD.
It also draws a fair amount from the wall (98W~), which is probably the dual GPU's not having power control with Linux.
If only Thunderbolt 2 drive enclosures would come down in price a little.
Eitherway, I share your enthusiasm for the Intel "cheese grater" Mac Pros', those have got to be effectively e-waste to most people soon and I'd love to hoard some for myself.
> it could be an extremely capable server. If not for the minuscule SSD.
You can get adapters from Apple's custom slot to a standard M.2 form factor, allowing you to use a modern M.2 NVMe drive. As long as you have already installed the firmware update that adds support for NVMe in addition to the AHCI protocol originally used by that machine, there shouldn't be any issues putting in one of today's relatively cheap multi-TB drives. The Mac Pro didn't have the physical space limitations that made some SSD adapters problematic for the laptops.
Admittedly my "trash can" Mac sees little use these days. I thought I'd miss macOS a lot when I switched to Windows in 2022, but it turns out that I could live without it, though I do have a work-issued MacBook Pro, and so in a sense I never truly left the Mac ecosystem. It's kind of hard talking about being a user of one particular OS when I work with Windows, macOS, and Linux weekly and with FreeBSD occasionally.
Regarding the 2019 Mac Pro, I just took a cursory look on eBay for 2019 Mac Pro models, and it appears they are still going for over $1,000. macOS still supports the 2019 Mac Pro, though its days are numbered since Apple usually has a 6-7 year window for supporting Macs.
I believe there are two main reasons why the Mac Pro is still so expensive despite the fact that a M4 Mac Mini would outperform it:
1. RAM. Not only does the 2019 Mac Pro support DIMMs, but it also supports a gigantic amount of RAM: 768GB on models with 8-16 cores, and 1.5TB on models with 24 or 28 cores (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102742). No ARM Mac supports this much RAM. This makes the 2019 Mac Pro a nice machine for very RAM-intensive tasks that require Mac software.
2. The 2019 Mac Pro has expansion slots, though the 2023 Mac Pro also has expansion slots.
In my experience the CPU is actually probably a good chunk of that power draw.
I swapped my trash cans CPU for an E5-2560L v2 I had laying around and I pull like 30-40 from the wall of if I remember right. 20 cores at 1.7GHz. Low and wide, which for my purposes (low grunt container workloads, home assistant, and such) is perfect. 70W TDP compared to the 130W standard six-core CPU.
There's mSATA (NVMe?) adapters for the trash can Mac Pros. They used to be pretty cheap ~$20. They're just a small pin adapter for the drives.
Thunderbolt is too new to have decent cheap open source cable/accessories available, but too old (and not popular enough when new) to have many actually useful cheap used accessories.
A lot of those old Macs would make decent little random servers if you could attach faster storage or networking without spending a ton.
> It also draws a fair amount from the wall (98W~)
Is that a typo?
No, seems like I'm not alone in the observation: https://kenrockwell.com/apple/mac-pro-late-2013.htm
(I used a kill-a-watt meter on my homelab at some point).
Yeah, note that’s at idle! Under full CPU load mine (12 core) pulls 230 watts. I’ve never stressed the GPUs at all.
Still doesn’t seem like a crazy amount of power! Neat.
Those 2019 Mac Pros are never going to go down that low.
- They're forever going to be the fastest Intel Macs, which makes them highly desirable.
- The Mac Pro simply does not sell at volume anymore, unlike the Power Mac G4 which did sell quite well to regular consumers. So they're quite rare.
- Everybody in the market for a Mac Pro knew the Apple Silicon transition was right around the corner, so they probably sold even less than we think. Even rarer.
- The iMac Pro had been out for a little while when those came out. Most people who needed Pro hardware had probably bought an iMac Pro. Even rarer still.
No joke, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple sold less than half a million of those 2019 Intel Mac Pros.