Xgrid was a neat idea, but it seems like a lot of the need for that particular type of computing on the Mac has since died off a little bit. I think XCode may still be able to do distributed compiles, but the new trend seems to be using a Mini or Mac Pro as an
xcode server, and let that machine take care of version control, automated building, and certain testing processes.
It's probably one of the few reasons I'd recommend somebody run an OS X Server at all today.
If the goal of this thread was to make me want a G4 Mini, it's succeeding.
Tangentially, 1.42GHz eMac G4 decked to the gills (2GB, big disk) is probably one of my top personal picks for a fast PowerPC machine. My PowerBook G4 was probably enough PowerPC laptop for a lifetime, but those eMacs had nice speakers, pretty good CRT displays, and just a unique overall appearance.
From a product and platform perspective I was really happy with Apple at that time, it's just that most of the hardware was woefully underperforming compared to literally everything else in the industry, it looks even worse if you compare it to one-generation-newer Macs running Intel processors, and to older Pentium 4s.
Just as a sort of fun figure, the 1.67GHz G4 in the last-generation PowerBook G4 (shipping in early 2006) scores the same on cinebench as the 1.8GHz ThinkPad T30, shipping in late 2002. There was a 2.4GHz processor available for the T30 as well.
That era, with Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 and that hardware was sort of when Apple started to really come into their current selves as selling a series of "application appliances", and I sort of wonder if we're not seeing a similar thing today with the Mac OS X 10.10 issues where even though the "requirements" aren't increasing, the amount of horsepower you realistically need to run the software well is increasing. (pure conjecture and I don't know if this is actually true of 10.10.)
In the phone and tablet markets, Apple has been very careful not to talk about specifications. HTC has always listed "528MHz ARM processor!" on their phones, and Apple never has, even though their desktop computers had specific specs. Apple's moving in this direction, simply referring to the CPU in the MacBook Air as the "i5" instead of the i5-4560U, which is what you'd see listed on Dell's or Lenovo's web site. (Not that either of them build anything with that CPU, which I consider to be a shame, but that's another issue.)
Similarly though, 2005-2009 was when Apple started shedding a lot of products. The
Xserve RAID for example, was a(n aging) component of an Apple-centric infrastructure for organizations that was not necessarily needed very much once Apple's only on-prem "enterprise" application,
PowerSchool (which was only ever "barely" theirs anyway) was shed in 2006. Mac OS X Server was never that great at what it claimed to do, it did it, but the whole point of it seemed to be this on-premise appliance that Apple has deemed is no longer necessary, at least in the form it existed in 10.6 and earlier.
Apple always gets compared to a UNIX workstation vendor and the mac mini and iMac are great "unix chores" boxes to succeed the NeXTstation, Sun SPARCstation series and low end SGIs and DECs like the Indy, Fuel, and DS10, but I definitely wonder whether or not they were also trying to get in at higher levels. (I mean, there was, for example, the
Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics, which was essentially a pile of xserves, an Ethernet switch and a UPS in a rack, which you could argue competed with some pretty big systems from SGI, Sun, HPQ (three platforms) and IBM at the time.)
Somewhere, there's a computing alt-history fanfic for an Apple and DEC that got together and bought Be, resulting in Alpha based Macs that were fast and ran a pretty great-looking reimaginging of OpenVMS. That's another thread, though.
Odd you got gigabit Ethernet back in the stone age of G4 towers but the much newer G4 mini is just 10/100.
At the time of its introduction, the least expensive Power Macintosh cost over three times what the mini did. The iMac G5 (which might have had Gigabit) cost nearly three times what the mini did, probably 2.7 times.
The eMac G4 is probably a better comparison, those cost $799 and $999, but also still had 10/100 Ethernet and otherwise extremely similar hardware ot the mini, and was 2005's 1.4GHz ULV iMac to the much more powerful iMac G5s.
The last generation of Power Macintosh G4s cost slightly less than the Power Macintosh G5, but those were probably getting cheap to make by the end of their run.
