Feast your eyes on this gorgeous combination of old and new, as photographed and (at least in part) brought bang up-to-date by Pedro Moura Pinheiro.
It’s an original Power Mac G4 Cube, circa 2000, but with a few modifications to its insides. The original 450MHz G4 processor and 256MB of RAM have been replaced with dual G4 chips and 1.5GB of RAM. Those changes were made by its original owner, but Pedro wanted to take things a step further when he bought the machine. It’s now zippy enough to run Photoshop CS4 without any trouble.
Pedro says: “The only thing I did was get an Intel 40GB SSD, place it in an external Firewire 400 enclosure, and install Leopard on it – basically, Firewire 400 is much faster than the internal IDE interface, so the speed benefit is greater than trying to install an IDE SSD inside the Cube.”
He knows what he’s talking about. Check out this stop-motion video of him dismantling, then re-assembling, a G4 iMac. Great stuff.
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
16 responses to “Decade-Old G4 Cube Gets Updated, Runs Leopard, Looks Amazing”
still the best looking Apple computer to date…
He plugged in an SSD…….WOW!
“…Firewire 400 is much faster than the internal IDE interface…” ??? that’s news to me! !
If I had the money to throw away I’d love to drop the innards of a new MBP in one of these. or if i wanted to go “cheap” I’d toss a previous generation mini inside. That would give me nice power, decent peripheral connections, and bluetooth support.
The Cube was such an amazing piece of engineering. Gorgeous, and ahead of its time in a lot of ways (as far as I’m concerned it’s the Mac Mini version 0). It was also waaaay too expensive.
Nice modifying! Others found a use to the old cubes (Nice iKleenex Box. lol) : http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd…
FireWire 400 vs. ATA-66 (yes, I know that it’s Mb vs MB, but in the end with the overheads and conversion problems, it ends up being faster).
I think that once you tie it to an external drive to it, it’ll lose some of the elegance of the design.