On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 13:00, James Devenish wrote: > Well, I don't know that iMacs could ever be said to fall into that > category.
Nor the eMac in my (admittedly limited) experience. > But I will say that I still /adore/ the SCSI PowerMac > 604-based stuff from the mid-late nineties. I'll agree there. The x200 range seems to be indestructible; we had a bunch in use at the POST that were bought near the release dates of the models, and kept on running until they were retired late '01. I had a couple of PSUs die across the 8 or so machines, but replacements were easy to come by - and frankly the way the POST's power was then I don't blame anything for dying for power-related reasons. I'm pretty happy with the G4 hardware in reliability terms, and it's lovely to have Mac hardware you can buy standard PCI, AGP, and SDRAM upgrade parts for. Not so thrilled with the eMac/iMac. > Some of the physical hardware > is really rewarding to deal with -- it's just a shame Apple didn't adopt > decent OpenFirmware for those models (to facilitate modern / third-party > operating systems). Thankfully, they _did_ adopt PCI, so 10/100 NICs etc are an easy and affordable upgrade for those machines. > Also, at the Guild, we still have a LaserWriter 8500 > that can outperform the newer HP LaserJet 4xxx series printers (albeit > at a lower resolution, which might account for the difference). I must say that I've never been able to go past the HP 4 series printers for lifetime and reliability. Apple's LaserWriters do seem to do very well, though - I know someone who still has an extremely early (possibly original) LaserWriter in service (connected to a PC!). > That > late-nineties, pre-iMac period of hardware from Apple amazes me, > compared to the "economy" of iMacs. The G4 stuff can be fine, but it's > a bit worrying to have seen models don't have manual ejection holes, *grr* . > programmers switches, etc. <rant> The lack of a reset switch and CD eject button on the dual 866MHz G4 (and others, no doubt) drives me *insane*. It's like Apple is trying to say "But OSX doesn't crash...". (a) yes, it does, though much less than OS9. (b) if you have to use OS9, the lack of the reset switch gets annoying, fast. (c) if you prefer non-Apple keyboards, the lack of the CD eject is also pretty painful. </rant> Craig Ringer
