Tangerine iMac G3 turned into a Hackintosh

John Brownlee ()

2183361594_63085cb562_bFor the last year or so, I’ve had an old indigo blue iMac G3, throbbing its orange oculus silently on my computer desk. I inherited it from the previous inhabitant of my apartment, and while I was at first enthusiastic about it, I’ve never quite been able to decide what I want to do with it.

While my budgerigar, Humbert J. Humbird, likes it well enough, converting it into a bird cage doesn’t really seem like a good idea: a gloomy demesne indeed for a parakeet already morbidly inclined. Another idea I had was to install Writeroom and put it in the front hallway of my palatial blogger’s luxury apartment, as a sort of guest book, but the only nook suitable is already the napping post of my senescent man servant, Beasley.

The other day, though, inspiration struck: I would Hackintosh it. I’d just rip out that iMac’s guts — the bulbous CRT, the 450MHz Power PC architecture, the 10GB hard drive and the 350MB RAM — and install a homemade mini-PC, hacked to run Snow Leopard. A perfect New Year’s project, and an excellent way to make that gorgeous, old and obsolete piece of plastic junk into a modern Mac.

I haven’t started yet — I expect the real challenges to be the installation of an LCD screen and getting the slot-loading DVD drive to play nice — but I was curious if anyone had tried to Hackintosh an old iMac G3. Sure enough, someone had, as demonstrated this gorgeous picture guide of some maker who gutted his own, tray-loading Tangerine iMac G3 and installed a Hackintosh.

Unfortunately, there’s no text instructions, but the process seems simple enough. I plan to start sometime in January, and I’ll update here about it as I do. Any of our Cultists done something similar and want to warn me away from potential pitfalls? Pipe up in the comments.

[Tangerine iMac G3 Hackintosh]

DON'T MISS
It Just Got Really Easy to Install Mac OS X Lion on Your Hackintosh

[Creative Commons Image from LRosa's Flickr]

18 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by .

Posted in Hardware | Tagged: , , , , |

  • http://toomuchgreen.eu RichBos

    Great idea. I’m always sad to these these wonderfully iconic design classics relegated to the obsolete scrap computer pile. I think the shells really are more than worthy of a second life in some guise, even more so if re-born with new guts to run Leopard.

    The new iMacs are obviously superb but these little units still have such character and legacy status.

    Or am I just a misty-eyed old Mac-head? :-)

    Richard

  • Rocky

    Or, you could just drop in a Mac Mini with a 14″ LCD screen and avoid all the fuss of hacking anything.

  • techiegoddess

    a delicious project in which I am jealous that I cannot undertake myself… Keep us posted :)

  • Um no

    wtf?! Try:
    “Tangerine iMac G3 MIGHT GET turned into a Hackintosh”

    John, you haven’t even started yet and you’re posting with a title like that? Give us a break, please…

  • John Brownlee

    Um no, you’ve misread the post. I link a guide in which a tangerine iMac has already been turned into a Hackintosh; as stated, my iMac Hackintosh will be an indigo blue one. That project can be theoretical without the already built one solipsistically blinking out of existence.

  • imajoebob

    I had the same reaction as Rocky: stuff a mini in for the guts. Even an older model off ebay will probably run faster/better than a hack. If the exercise is to repurpose the old case, this does the trick.

  • Charli

    ditto with Rocky and imajoebob. probably a lot easier and it’s legal. WIN

  • Charli

    although looking at the photos and seeing the tower, i’m wondering if it is a hackintosh or just an old g5 stuffed into a new case.

  • John Brownlee

    The Mac Mini solution is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, I want the end Hackintoshed G3 to actually hook up to as many of the G3 chassis’ ports as possible. I want it to seem like a fully functioning G3… not like another computer crammed in its case. That just can’t be done by cramming a Mac Mini in there: hell, the optical drives wouldn’t even line up. I really need to build my own PC to get everything working out of the original ports.

    Also, frankly, I just don’t care: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an enthusiast who owns three separate Macs from Hackintoshing for the fun of it. In fact, I’m writing this right now at my local pub on an Asus Eee PC 1000HE running Snow Leopard. I love it, but if Apple brought out a small, ultraportable laptop with a 10 hour battery life, I’d instantly buy it for twice as much. As a lover of Apple, a Hackintosh can’t ever compare, but my own moral compass says that in the absence of Apple allowing me to, say, pay to upgrade my G3 into a newer machine, there’s nothing wrong with doing it myself.

  • John Brownlee

    imajoebob: why do you think an old Mac Mini would run better than a Hackintoshed, custom-built rig? That doesn’t go along with my experience at all.

  • Doug

    I’m afraid my old G3iMac is currently being used, as my fireplace! It rocks, maybe when I get tired of that I’ll do the same & hackintosh it!

  • imajoebob

    John – Apple designs its systems to get the best balanced performance from a short list of compatible parts. Going “off label” from those parts may give you better individual part performance, but can prove problematic under OS X. Heck, it’s already problematic under Windows, and that’s designed to work with thousands of disparate parts. I always have to laugh at the PCers who claim Apple gets a premium, but when they want a system that really screams they end up buying AlienWare, which uses the Apple design approach and costs MORE than comparable macs!

    What’s so problematic about the mini? It’s not possible to deconstruct it, maybe replace a few cables? Or is it too modular, with a few cables, like my PowerBook?

  • Simmie

    Ummm, if you are worried about the mac mini internals connecting to the g3 chassis, you might want to talk to this guy

    http://www.kiwidee.com/kiwidee/cs_e.html

    I personally would prefer this to a hackintosh since its a mac, has a kick-arse sub AND makes coffee :D

  • Shawn Boucke

    How is the project coming? I have an old iMac that looks nice, but I do not know what to do with it. I keep thinking about loading Ubuntu on it, but i already have a perfectly good laptop.

  • Jordan

    Any chance you successfully did this and have pictures or a guide to help others?

  • http://www.ingledow.co.uk David Ingledow

    Did you complete this project  - I would really like to do the same!!

  • Aleix Bou

    I want to do it too!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KDNB5WIWOMSIONKJHYUDU3UT3U Jessica

    I”m dying to do this to my iMac!!