Are PCI Powermacs hard to find now?

[AlpineRaven]

It is dried up at the moment but every now again one or two pops up...
I just recently snapped up silent upgrade Mac Mini 1.5ghz G4 after several weeks looking for one!

 

[Unknown_K]

Never had a Mac Mini, how well have they held up over time?

 

[adespoton]

Never had a Mac Mini, how well have they held up over time?

<looks down>
Mine's still running and acting as a network file server? It's even still using the stock Fujitsu HDD; everything about it is stock from 2005, running perfectly fine for 21 years. Because I've got it running as a file server, it's always on; it's been running for the last 18 years with no issues other than the occasional power outage that lasts longer than the UPS it's plugged into.

 

[KURB]

Beige macs are all getting harder to find for all the reasons mentioned above. You can see from ebay sold listings these powerpc models are indeed going up in price, as well.

 

[adespoton]

<looks down>
Mine's still running and acting as a network file server? It's even still using the stock Fujitsu HDD; everything about it is stock from 2005, running perfectly fine for 21 years. Because I've got it running as a file server, it's always on; it's been running for the last 18 years with no issues other than the occasional power outage that lasts longer than the UPS it's plugged into.

I just checked; the drive's been active for 20832 hours, 2 minutes and 13 seconds. I had it set to park when not active for a number of years Surprised that total uptime over 21 years is only 2.38 years; that probably explains why it's still fully functional with no errors.

 

[trag]

The thing I've been missing in the listing is Macintosh clones. Those were thick on the ground back when. Now they don't seem to come up in listings and if they do, the seller thinks he's at Christie's. One difficulty is that PowerComputing was if not the largest, the most interesting clone maker, and their name is too generic to easily search with. And PCC doesn't seem to do any better.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Prime time to get these machines was the early 00s. Many places were switching over to G3/G4s to run OS X. I got a ton of these machines from a local college when they were scrapping them en-mass in 2002-03. Jokes on them, with an upgrade card and some RAM, they could run OS X pretty well via XPostFacto for a few more years after that. The TNT/PowerSurge platform was solidly built and highly up-gradable.

I would not be surprised if many of these were literally run into the ground until 06-07 or so and scrapped.