50 G4 Minis (not mine)

[trag]

Here's what someone needs:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-Of-50-Apple-Mac-Mini-1-25GHz-512-MB-40-GB-HD-W-Power-Adapters-ONLY-100-LEFT-/161464162711?pt=US_Wholesale_Desktop_Computers&hash=item2598039997

$1250 is a lot of money, but it's only $25 per Mini and they come with the power adapters...

 

[switch998]

I was looking at that, but factor in a few hundred more for freight shipping and it's not such a great deal.

 

[Unknown_K]

How much time and effort would it take to snag them, clean them, store them, inspect them, install an OS, and sell them for a profit (are they worth much anymore)?

Maybe at $10 a pop delivered it would be worth it assuming you want to keep a few of them for yourself.

 

[max1zzz]

If they where in the UK (and I had the money) I would totally snag them But then the G4 Mini's are a great love of mine - A referb 1.25ghz mini was my first ever computer

No idea what I would do with them, perhaps build a really slow and inefficient cluster computer...

 

[switch998]

How much time and effort would it take to snag them, clean them, store them, inspect them, install an OS, and sell them for a profit (are they worth much anymore)?

Maybe at $10 a pop delivered it would be worth it assuming you want to keep a few of them for yourself.

The best way to get a deal like that would probably be to watch a government auction. Schools near me are clearing out of G4 iBooks, powermacs, imacs, and minis by the boatload... I think the lot of minis went for around $15 each. That's probably where this guy got his.

something like these are what you should look for: https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=15&acctid=6543

https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=1&acctid=7060

https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=788&acctid=4788

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

I don't have $27,000.

 

[switch998]

I don't have $27,000.

Look at the other two

 

[uniserver]

I think that is a fair deal for those mini's

Just not really sure what one would do with all this G4 mini's

I guess it would be super cool if someone could hack Mac os9 native on one of those... man it would scream.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

If they were dead, you could use them to make some kind of wall...

I still want a G4 Mini. They're cute. But I want the rare 1.5GHz version with the 64MB VRAM.

 

[CelGen]

I wouldn't pay $500 for the lot. Minis are cool but G4 minis are almost impossible to sell now because they're so slow.

 

[uniserver]

i use to oc the 1.2 and 1.4 version to 1.57 - 1.58  there are some resistors you have to rearange. 

 

[johnklos]

They're not that slow. They run Leopard pretty well, particularly if you add one of those adapters which lets you add a 2.5" SATA drive in place of the DVD drive. I have one running Leopard which can play full screen Hulu very well and which still gets used for Final Cut 6 sometimes. They also make excellent little machines for running NetBSD.

 

[Unknown_K]

They are worthless now, but in 10 years people will want them for running old apps and PPC games since they are small. Problem is predicting what will be worth money 10 years from now and storing that stuff so it won't rust (if you like to speculate more then collect and use). Now If they could play NETFLIX in HD people would love them.

 

[Byrd]

About a year ago, I received about 25 Mac Mini G4s from my wife's school - they were going to the bin and were previously used for things like propping up tables higher (!), unfortunately only a few power bricks came with the haul.  I ended up giving away many of them to fellow local Mac nuts as they really are slow little things compared to equivalently-specced desktop G4s, but cool to those who wanted a small PPC machine.

The ones I sold were the "silent revision" 1.5Ghz models, they went quickly, most of them to Amiga fans who wanted to run MorphOS.  I did give MorphOS a try on my saved souped-up Mini (overclocked to 1.83Ghz, 1GB, 7200RPM 2.5" HD), it is quite an interesting OS to learn.

50 of the lowest-specced units, presumably with horrible 4200RPM 40GB drives and 512MB RAM will be hard to sell.

JB

 

[John_A]

I guess you could use them and set up a Apple Xgrid cluster. I always thought that would be a cool thing to try at a larger scale.

 

[Superdos]

I wanted a Mac Mini for the longest time. friend up in Ontario acquired a bunch from the school district and locked them up inside his office. he did have fun trashing the eMacs being retired at the same time, however... so big that they didn't even fit in the largest garbage cans the school had-- so they went straight into the dumpster after being stripped of hard drives, RAM and DVD drives. I'm told they made satisfying, heavy crunches as they piled up. (don't worry, they were the horrible 700MHz ones.)

From what I understand, he still has them in his office, to this day, in a neat stack of about 10-15 of them or so. they're most likely the 1.25 model because schools are cheap, but I used to want one of them badly. ended up getting a late 2009 high-end Intel Mac Mini and upgraded that to max specs (which for the hard drive has a new max of 2TB now and I'm still on a 1TB drive for it...!) so I haven't really asked about them much.

there IS a market out there for the mac mini's, but they won't move in large numbers for at least another few years. G3 stuff is starting to get expensive now as supply dries up, and G4 towers are going for 200 a pop on fleabay.

it's also my understanding there's a Mac-oriented community of audio people with old music gear that has drivers only for MacOS 9, that's usable otherwise aside from that. I think there's some OSX stuff mixed in there too-- but I'm not sure if those require PCI slots to take advantage of or if that's USB/Firewire stuff that a Mac Mini could handle. most I have for Mac audio equipment is a 3rd revision (pre-white box) Griffin iMic.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

G4 tower pricing varies greatly, it's odd.

 

[MinerAl]

They make great brains for MAME machines.  Finding the DVI->Composite video adapters is the hard part.

 

[Gorgonops]

The ones I sold were the "silent revision" 1.5Ghz models, they went quickly, most of them to Amiga fans who wanted to run MorphOS.  I did give MorphOS a try on my saved souped-up Mini (overclocked to 1.83Ghz, 1GB, 7200RPM 2.5" HD), it is quite an interesting OS to learn.

It's sort of ironic that 10 year old long-discontinued Apple hardware actually benchmarks just as well on most tests as a $3,000 AmigaONE X1000. I love Amiga-People, don't get me wrong, but... guys, it really is time to give up. Obviously Hyperion would be shooting what's left of the Amiga hardware development scene straight in the foot if they ported the "real" AmigaOS 4.0 to run on leftover Apple hardware instead of whatever harebrained scheme they have in the pipe now (Apparently there's an "X5000" in the works using PPC chips designed to power network routers... which I positively guarantee aren't going to be particularly impressive running a general-purpose OS) but it's nonetheless pretty sad.

(As an aside, the X1000's performance may also shed some additional light on why Apple dumped PPC for Intel. The machine uses the PWRficient CPU core that was pretty much Apple's only other option besides IBM's wares if they'd stuck with POWER. Clock for clock it looks worse than the G4; granted, being used for AmigaOS *really* puts it in a bad light because there's essentially *zero* multiprocessor support, but even if you double the usable core count it's still not exactly "blow you to the back of the auditorium" performance compared to *anything* in Intel's catalog post-NetBurst.)