Using an Apple Power Mac G5 in 2022 - Is It Still Usable?

[Music] i've been a mackie user ever since i got my first ibook g3 over 20 years ago and in fact i recently did an entire video dedicated to that very machine and today i own around 12 different models of max i've estimated from over the decades and in fact i'm editing this very video on one of their new m1 mac minis but there was always one model of max that i lusted over but could never afford and at the time it was introduced it was described as the world's fastest personal computer of course we're talking about the behemoth that is the power mac g5 introduced by steve jobs at apple's worldwide developer conference in 2003 the power mac g5 specs had actually been leaked onto apple's website a few weeks earlier and this was something that maybe a bit out of character steve actually joked about in his presentation but at the time the specs of the new g5 based mac were almost too good to be true featuring an ibm powerpc 970 cpu it was the first time we'd seen a full 64-bit processor on a consumer product and it was contained in this stunning anodized aluminium case or aluminum for my american friends and apple actually kept this case for the first intel mac pros and after a bit of a misstep with a 2013 redesign commonly referred to as the trashcan mac they've actually returned to a similar style for the current high-end max and this is my dual 2 gigahertz g5 now this particular model was introduced in june of 2003 and then discontinued a year later and the front of the case has often been jokingly referred to as the cheese grater mac for obvious reasons and we've got an internal four-speed dvd-r and cd-rw superdrive in here hiding behind the cover and also it's very handy that we've got some ports for quick access on the front of the machine as well including an audio headphone jack a single usb 2.0 port a firewire 400 connector and we've got a very stylish metal power button with a white led above it and like the power mac g3 and g4 we have carrying handles on the top of the case which are needed as this thing weighs around 18 kilograms you would not want to drop this on your toe and on the removable side panels we have a nice big apple logo and there is plenty of fun to be had around the back of this machine as well now we've got these two massive exhaust fans we'll talk more about that in just a bit and a standard power cable connector and then we've got connections for airport wi-fi antenna and bluetooth antenna below we've got optical audio out and in dual usb 2.0 ports firewire 400 and 800 connectors gigabit ethernet and an internal dial up modem so lots of connectivity on the back of this machine and i think it was the look of this machine that first caught my attention it just looked like a really top of the range workstation and even today it's got a real premium feel to it but the case is not just all looks it's actually a work of art in system cooling design as well and it needed to be as these things run hot and opening the case is really straightforward all you do no screws to remove or anything you just press in the latch on the side here and then you can remove the side panel and here we go first look at how nicely organized the internals of this machine are it's all made for cooling now we remove this plastic screen inside and we can get inside the machine itself and this is not actually the original case that my machine came in that particular case was damaged by a courier company who it looked like had a game of five aside football with the machine judging by the condition it arrived in but i did manage to get a replacement empty case off ebay around 10 years ago for around 40 pounds and back then these cases were very plentiful as lots of people were making custom pc builds inside these cases but if some of the more eagle-eyed mac fans notice a few things that don't match or from different revisions that's probably why and the main feature is the huge g5 processors that we see here now this is before we had dual core this is actually two physical cpus they're hidden underneath this cover and under there we have two gigantic heatsinks and in later g5 machines apple actually used water cooling for the only time in their history to bring the temperatures down now a couple of years ago i did replace the thermal paste on these a few years back and the cpus in my machine usually idle at around 60 degrees celsius but i have seen them go as high as 80 to 85 degrees when under load and that's even with all this cooling which on the plus side it doesn't mean in the winter the power mac g5 replaces the need for a room heater in my office and you'll see there are fans everywhere in here the case design has been made to optimize airflow and cooling and actually these high temperatures of the g5 chips and their high power consumption were the main reason that apple never released a laptop based on the g5 architecture despite the many mock-ups that we saw online back in the day and really it was a big factor in their decision to move away from the power pc architecture to intel just three years after this machine was released and we've got the optical drive and space for two hard disks in here interestingly this was the first machine i'd ever seen that used sata as their previous max before this used ide and people do replace these with ssds which might be an upgrade that i do to this machine at some point in the future and my power mac g5 is fitted with one gigabyte of ddr ram expandable to eight gigs which was a hell of a lot of ram in 2003 and you'll spot a few standard pci express slots in here and i've got a radeon 9600 pro video card in the 8x agp pro slot which i believe these are actually customized slightly to work with max i don't think you can plug a standard pc one in here without first modifying the firmware there's also a 3.6 volt lithium battery to keep the system settings when the machine is powered off and the power mac g5 shipped with apple's full-size usb keyboard which looks really nice and it is very heavy compared to their later metal keyboards but this one is all plastic and the keys have got quite a bit of travel on here but i've got to say it's not my favorite keyboard to type on as the keys feel a little bit mushy for my taste and we get a white version of the usb optical mouse which unlike the earlier pro mouse it doesn't have that useless tension dial on the bottom to change the click force setting which to be honest didn't really do much anyway and like all apple mice these do have their fans and their haters as well for me i've got to say they do feel quite comfortable in the hand i can definitely see the comparisons with a bar of soap which i've read online before and steve jobs loved the idea of having a buttonless mouse so that means the whole top casing of the mouse acts like a button and this keyboard and mouse both fit in with apple's white aesthetic that they were really going for in 2003 when the ipod was really taking off personally though i tend to use the slightly later 2005 mighty mouse which retains much of the styling and feel of the earlier mice but also gives you a right click if you have two fingers on the mouse and a little scroll ball which really i can't live without a scroll these days so that's the hardware but how usable is apple's top-end workstation almost 20 years after it was released well i'm gonna get it set up next i'll show you some new operating system updates and even a brand new released operating system that i run on this machine before i do that though you might have heard about vpns before and how they can help protect your privacy and make it seem like you're connecting from other parts of the world and that means you can view content that's usually region specific on popular streaming services and with 5500 plus servers in 59 countries nordvpn really unlocks it all and for security nordvpn comes highly recommended and offers double encryption technology meaning you go via two vpn servers the second of which is totally unaware of your original ip address and it works with most operating systems including your smartphone and has unlimited bandwidth and no data logging and it's so fast you can leave it on the background and forget about it you don't even realize that you've got it on and it even improves your online experience with their cybersec suite which blocks ads and protects you from malware and other online threats now nordvpn have been kind enough to support my channel so if you like my content please support them back and take advantage of this incredible offer head to my unique link nordvpn.com danwood and get nordvpn's cyber security package and four months completely free and it is risk risk-free with nordvpn's 30-day money-back guarantee all right then so time to get the power mac g5 booted up and despite all of the cooling inside the case the biggest surprise is just how quiet this machine actually runs but if you want to hear how those fans can sound on full power well when i first boot up the mac of course we get the system chime and then i get a dual boot menu so at this stage the system can't detect the temperature as none of the measurement reporting tools are running so after a couple of minutes it will go into a fail safe so gradually over the next two minutes or so the fans start to ramp up until they really hit full speed and this is what that sounds like [Music] yeah even from the next room this thing sounds like you're running a vacuum cleaner it roars but luckily when we select an operating system to boot into the fans quickly calm down and it boots up now the last official version of mac os that supports this machine is os 10 leopard that was released in 2007 and this was a really big update when it was released boasting more than 300 new features over the previous tiger release and back then apple used to charge for each new operating system release and leopard sold for 129 at retail and it was shipped on a dual layer dvd as it was too big to fit onto a standard dvd disk owing to the fact that leopard contained a universal distribution because in 2006 apple announced that they were leaving the power pc architecture behind and moving to the industry standard intel x86 platform but it turned out they'd actually been developing os x secretly for both intel and power pc for several years behind the scenes and the transition went pretty much the same way as it's going now from intel to apple silicon using rosetta now version one of rosetta could run pal pc binaries on intel machines but for a while developers just compiled two different versions one for intel and one for ppc and that was known as a universal binary which did mean they were twice the size but there wasn't much way around that and this is the mac os 10 leopard desktop featuring its default trademark purple galaxy wallpaper now i've got to say i always loved the aesthetic of this version of mac os we can see the dock at the bottom with the programs on a 3d ledge and it was the first time that we saw stacks in the dock as well where you could drag folders in and have the contents cascade out of them on a doc shortcut and this is actually still present in mac os today the finder got a bit of a redesign as well looking very much like itunes and they even had cover flow in here as well which was lifted from itunes to look through your files and preview media this way too and leopard included a pretty big update to apple's media playing software front row which in this version was designed to mimic the then new apple tv device and they actually used to ship a little infrared remote control with laptop macs and minis just to use front row and it was a nice feature before the rise of dedicated living room media devices we saw spaces for the first time an implementation of virtual desktops allowing multiple desktops with certain applications and windows in each different desktop and apple made a big deal of spaces with the release of leopard and we saw time machine in here for the first time an automated backup utility which allows the user to restore files that have been deleted or replaced with another version of a file and it's got a very cool user interface in leopard and again time machine is a feature that lives on in modern mac os today now this video is not meant to be a leopard demo but it does give you a bit of an idea of the state of the mac platform at the time when the power mac g5 was still in use and how apple left it because leopard was their final release on the powerpc platform but interestingly last year there was a newer version of mac os which was released and runs on the palmac g5 and this version is called sorbet leopard and sorbet leopard was put together by the fan community last year and it combines elements of leopard version 10.5.8 the last official release of mac os for the pal pc and there was also a beta version of os 10.6 snow leopard that was never officially released for power pc but it was leaked so what they've done is combine some of the newer elements from that while of course a long way from a current mac it does mean that we get more up-to-date versions of some of the core file systems but they've also improved performance startup times and brought some new system themes from current mac os releases so if you want your g5 to look like a modern mac desktop you can get pretty close and one important behind the scenes update to sorbet leopard is they updated security certificates to 2021 standards and this is really cool they've bundled some third-party applications with it including a power pc app store so you can download native ppc apps for your g5 and of course there's a lot more to sorbet leopard than i've showed in this video but i thought i'd give you a brief overview of it and i do think it's very cool that the fans are continuing to keep the power pc platform alive so if you want to download sorbet leopard i'll put a link in the video description and there is another operating system that i run on here that is still in development a commercial os called morpho s now i've done dedicated videos on morpho s in the past but it is actually a modern third-party upgrade of amiga os now this started life back in the 90s originally running on commodore amiga computers that were fitted with a power pc accelerator now when they stopped being available they ported over the operating system to the most affordable power pc platform and at the time was the mac and it's still being developed today in fact the version i'm running here 3.17 was released just three months ago in may of 2022 and i'll probably do a full revisit of morpho s in a dedicated video soon but it is a very responsive and efficient operating system with a big library of native applications that it can run and actually are bundled with it as well including a modern web browser called wayfarer that handles a lot more modern websites than the old versions of safari for example on leopard or even something from a couple of years ago like the upgraded pal pc browser 10 for fox but again you are limited by the machine's hardware so trying to watch media you know for example youtube videos in the browser the machine does struggle with but actually there are scripts that you can download and stream youtube videos directly using the native operating systems player and that solution works really well and they've bundled a new email client called iris that works well and it's really easy to set up with modern services like gmail and protonmail and morphos can actually run a lot of the old commodore amiga 68k programs seamlessly with a built-in emulation layer so if you ever wanted that kind of high-end amiga machine that i lusted over back in the late 90s this feels very close to that experience now morpho s is a commercial operating system and you do have to pay for it it costs 79 euros for a single machine license but there is a free 30-minute trial version that you can download and run on a live cd if you want to try it out so to answer the question i posed earlier how usable is the power mac g5 in 2022 well in many ways you can still do all your standard day-to-day things with it just a bit slowly now basic things like word processing for example you know they're pretty timeless image editing that kind of thing you can do all that just fine on here but then we get to more modern demanding things you know stuff like social networks and streaming media to be honest you could do that a lot better on something like a raspberry pi and at the moment with the rising cost of energy it is really difficult to justify doing anything on such a power hungry machine as the g5 particularly when it's very simple tasks but i do love my power mac g5 and in many ways it represents the last and final form of apple's power pc era and although it fizzled out and the power pc dream on desktop faded it still feels and looks like a really well designed system and something that i am very pleased to have in my collection so i hope you enjoyed that look at the apple power mac g5 just a quick reminder that if you like my videos here on youtube i also do a weekly retro gaming and technology podcast with new episodes released every friday now we bring you up to speed on all the big goings on in retro tech and gaming and we bring you an interview with a veteran on each week's show and we've got a massive back catalogue of over 350 episodes so if you want to check that out you can get it from any podcast app search for the retro hour podcast i'll see you smart speaker to play the retro hour podcast or head to our website at the retrohour.com and while you're here on youtube here are another couple of my videos i think you might enjoy thank you for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Dan Wood

Views: 72,288

Keywords: apple, g3, g4, g5, ppc, powerpc, dual-core, intel, core-2-duio, mac, powermac, mac os x leopard, mac sorbet leopard, morphos, morphos mac, morphos amiga, vintage, obsolete, ram, cpu, macintosh, powermac g5, 2003 pc, 2003 mac, 2003 apple, 2000s apple mac, wwd, dan wood

Id: mxMsPE12gfc

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022