How rare are these?
There's one on sale for the equivalent of $50 near me.
There's one on sale for the equivalent of $50 near me.
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Quicksilver zip-drives
- Thread starter ArmorAlley
- Start date
I'm not sure what you are asking: how rare is a QS with a Zip drive installed? They are obviously getting rarer the more they are scrapped, but I don't think they are especially scarce as G4 towers go.
Many of them shipped with a Zip drive, since that's what the lower front bay is sized for. I'm not sure how the machine could be adapted to accommodate anything larger than a Zip in that lower bay. The Zip in question would normally be a standard 250MB IDE drive.
I'd say that $50 for a QS is not bad in a place as expensive as Switzerland, assuming you can avoid shipping charges. A cup of coffee there would run to what, $5? So it's ten cups of coffee, taking that as a "translatable" measure of the price. Ten cups of coffee is probably the going rate for a QS!
I like them. They are about as quiet as the G4 towers get, and are to my eye the most attractive of the series. I just parted out a dead 733mhz QS, as it happens, that I could not fix (Oh how I tried), and transplanted its Zip and the accompanying bezel into a working dual 1ghz model, which didn't have one. That QS is destined to be my kick-ass OS9 machine.
Many of them shipped with a Zip drive, since that's what the lower front bay is sized for. I'm not sure how the machine could be adapted to accommodate anything larger than a Zip in that lower bay. The Zip in question would normally be a standard 250MB IDE drive.
I'd say that $50 for a QS is not bad in a place as expensive as Switzerland, assuming you can avoid shipping charges. A cup of coffee there would run to what, $5? So it's ten cups of coffee, taking that as a "translatable" measure of the price. Ten cups of coffee is probably the going rate for a QS!
I like them. They are about as quiet as the G4 towers get, and are to my eye the most attractive of the series. I just parted out a dead 733mhz QS, as it happens, that I could not fix (Oh how I tried), and transplanted its Zip and the accompanying bezel into a working dual 1ghz model, which didn't have one. That QS is destined to be my kick-ass OS9 machine.
$50 Quicksilvers of almost and kind are getting thin on the ground if you ask me.
There's one 933MHz w/ zip locally, still hasn't dropped from the original $99 asking price. Haven't jumped on it.
The MDD dual 1.13 GHz (?never seen that speed...) G4 has gone down to $75, which is interesting.
The MDD dual 1.13 GHz (?never seen that speed...) G4 has gone down to $75, which is interesting.
Coffee is not yet $5 a cup (unless you want to be fleeced in Starbucks) but it is getting there. It's varies from (the equivalent of) $3.20 up to $4.50 depending on where you are.
My thoughts are more like this:
I don't especially want a Quicksilver but this one is nearby and very reasonably priced. I recently bought a 17" PB G4 and this is my primary G4. I also have 2 broken MDDs and 2 graphite G4s.
That being said, if the Quicksilver zip-bezel is so rare, then it might be worth buying it just for that and keeping it just in case I should ever want a Quicksilver or should want to trade it against something that I do really want.
The question, I suppose, was: is this a unicorn? I hadn't seen, or, at least, noticed them much before, but it seems that the answer is no.
This machine is not really a unicorn. It was a factory option from apple. If you want it, it looks like a pretty okay deal, but it's not really important per se, and you can use a ZIp without the special bezel, it just looks less good.
It's tough to guess how many actually shipped that way because it looks like it became a BTO option as preferences shifted away from Zip toward burning CDs/DVDs and using USB-based media.
So, it definitely appears to be less common here than in the previous chassis (which was used for three or four generations of powermac). My QS'02 has it, but.
Incidentally, looking through on wayback captures of Apple's site, it looks like Zip became a BTO option as of either the Gigabit Ethernet family or the Digital Audio family, which was probably good since Zips had been holding up high end Power Mac shipments since literally Apple started bundling them in 1997.
It's tough to guess how many actually shipped that way because it looks like it became a BTO option as preferences shifted away from Zip toward burning CDs/DVDs and using USB-based media.
So, it definitely appears to be less common here than in the previous chassis (which was used for three or four generations of powermac). My QS'02 has it, but.
Incidentally, looking through on wayback captures of Apple's site, it looks like Zip became a BTO option as of either the Gigabit Ethernet family or the Digital Audio family, which was probably good since Zips had been holding up high end Power Mac shipments since literally Apple started bundling them in 1997.
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My wife has friends who last year took their son to McDonalds while in Geneva on holiday. The child doesn't normally get such fare, and the parents otherwise avoid it for medical reasons (mother has irritable bowel). Anyway, in they went, buying some sort of Happy Meal for the kid and two coffees with a single fries to be shared between the parents. They paid by plastic, and having sat down, got out a calculator on the phone to see what they had been charged, as it seemed a lot. It turned out to be close to $60 Canadian, apparently. They maybe might not have known the numbers, but that's about x3 the cost of it here.
My $5CAD is, of course, more like $4US, which means, I guess, that your $50 conversion is more like $60 to me. And that's about the going rate for a local machine like the one in question in my part of the world. Older ones tend to go for more, of course, as well.
What I didn't know is what has emerged from others' comments in this thread: that the Zip bezel is a relative rarity. I really like the Zip option, because it makes things easy to move around between beige and older machines before USB, so am glad I've got one.
My $5CAD is, of course, more like $4US, which means, I guess, that your $50 conversion is more like $60 to me. And that's about the going rate for a local machine like the one in question in my part of the world. Older ones tend to go for more, of course, as well.
What I didn't know is what has emerged from others' comments in this thread: that the Zip bezel is a relative rarity. I really like the Zip option, because it makes things easy to move around between beige and older machines before USB, so am glad I've got one.
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Travel in general is expensive these days!
Just got a pair of airplane tickets to NYC (one each for my mother and myself), and it cost about $4,600! That doesn't include the cost of house sitters (~$1,000), hotel (~$1,400), or any other things.
It's criminal how much airlines charge! I don't like the non-refundable nature of tickets either. What if I change my mind and want to go on another flight instead? Sorry!!
Oh, well, for as much as it cost us, our trip better be fun!
c
Just got a pair of airplane tickets to NYC (one each for my mother and myself), and it cost about $4,600! That doesn't include the cost of house sitters (~$1,000), hotel (~$1,400), or any other things.
It's criminal how much airlines charge! I don't like the non-refundable nature of tickets either. What if I change my mind and want to go on another flight instead? Sorry!!
Oh, well, for as much as it cost us, our trip better be fun!
c
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