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.
