PowerMac G4 Cube

this is my PowerMac G4 Cube. she doesn't have a name of any sort, but i've had her for almost as long as i can remember. she wasn't the first computer i ever used at home, but she was the first i have distinct memories of, and the first i remember working on. my dad bought her in 2001 from a university auction, right after apple discontinued them. from then until around 2009 she was the family mac, until she was replaced by an aluminum imac. at that point she became my mac, and i used her for a few years until i replaced her with a hand-me-down macbook pro. even after that tho, i kept her out and did my best to find uses for her. they got rarer and rarer for years, but i really did just love being able to use her. even after all these years she's still probs my favorite mac that i've ever owned.

i don't think a single part is original, besides the case and keyboard. the motherboard was swapped years ago to try and fix some faulty ports, the dvd drive is an aftermarket one to replace the dead original, the factory rage 128 was swapped for geforce 2mx, the ram was bumped from 512mb to 1gb, the display was replaced with an identical one when the original backlight died, the original 20gb hard drive was swapped for an 80gb unit, and then a 250gb unit when that died while it was in storage, and the mouse was replaced with a string of apple mighty mice, which all developed issues with tracking or the scroll ball. i helped with most of those repairs, as well as the yearly os upgrades from apple, since she got os x with 10.1 and eventually maxed out with 10.4. we could've pushed her further to 10.5, but it would've been very slow with the stock cpu and we didn't wanna sacrifice the silence in order to swap in a replacement cpu. i've been reconsidering that as of late, since i find myself more and more nervous about every one of my fanless macs, and if i end up sticking a fan in there, then there's no reason not to add a faster cpu, if i can still get one

as an actual user machine, she's really quite lovely. quiet, snappy, more than enough power to run anything compatible with os 9, and with a really nice screen that both looks good, and doesn't force me to fight with aspect ratio issues. there is some instability with some games, but at least part of that is probably down to me not knowing the os well enough. i did my best not to boot into os 9 as a kid, mostly cuz i didn't know how to do anything and i was scared i'd break something and get in trouble over it. this has led to some gaps in my knowledge, such as having to turn off networked file sharing to help with game stability. i'm getting more familiar with it tho, and it's making me wish i had more space to keep it out for use more often. it's not as easy to set up or store as my imac, but it's got an awful lot more personality, as well as gpu horsepower. it really does make me want to try learning to code for os 9, just for the fun of it, as well as my perennial dislike of modern OSes and all the overhead that seems to come with any modern program.

eventually i hope to get her a more permanent spot in my computer set up. with the big drive it should be easy to set up a dual boot os 9/os x setup, and while she's not particularly fast for os x games, it would make it a lot easier to get files on her. as it is, i have her tied into a lan with mica and clementine and she pulls files from mica and then passes them on to clementine. one of these days i would love to get a retronas set up to make it even easier, but for now this works for me. she does technically have a copy of tiger installed on a second partition, but i haven't been able to get it to boot yet. some brief research suggests that there is some mild wizardry involved in getting that set up to work, but i am excited to do that some day. for now tho, she's a solid, lovely addition to my collection, and a fantastic machine for playing quake or star wars galactic battlegrounds.