2022 PowerPC Challenge writeup

This honestly wouldn't be a challenge for me. It isn't -- I own a few x64 machines, but for the last several months 75% of my non-mobile computing has been done on PowerPC Macs from the 2000s. And I honestly haven't even had much difficulty with it; I guess my demands may be light, but they've handled what I've thrown at them with aplomb. As such, this won't really be a success report.

My main computer right now is this iBook G4 1.42GHz with maxed out RAM running Sorbet Leopard. I would like to try Linux, but that will have to wait for the SSD mod. Alongside it are an iBook G3 900MHz and a Power Mac G4 450MHz that I mostly use for Mac OS 9.

I'm not sure how to format this post, so I'll just sort of describe the sorts of things I can do with each.

Snow iBook -- the worst best laptop ever

I'm writing this on the exact iBook G4 1.42GHz laptop computer that many people over the last 15 years have said is completely useless. It isn't. I can't think of another laptop from the year 2005 that's held up so well; my Dell Inspiron 2200 from the exact same year is certainly a champion, but its Pentium 3 really doesn't hold up amazingly in 2021. On the other hand, this iBook G4 is chugging straight along with InterWebPPC and Tiger. I can open YouTube and Discord and I'm certain I'd be able to open up Blender right now and whip up some 3D models no sweat -- maybe not render them into movie clips, but I'm not even sure if it's not up to the task if the scene is simple enough.

 

It also still holds a whole two hour charge, which is pretty amazing. And, I really like the two-finger scrolling trackpad. It works pretty well, actually.

I'll write a followup when I've installed Sorbet Leopard, but as it is right now, I really love this little laptop. It's fast (nearly as fast as Mac OS 9), lightweight, and has a much nicer screen size than my little cell phone which is simultaneously too small and too big at 6.5". The keyboard feels nice and crisp, and the plastic has a very nice feel to it overall. Plus, I just think it looks really good. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to get into PowerPC without spending $3,000 on a Raptor computer, or waiting for the PowerPC Notebook project.

That's about all the good things I have to say today.

 

It really seems like Apple hired the laziest people on Earth to build these things. My iBook G3's bottom plastic is already popping off from just being touched. It hasn't had an issue with it, but the graphics chip (a Mobility Radeon 7500) is known to just melt off the motherboard. And damn, does it get hot. It's nearly burned my legs.

 

This G4 isn't worse, but it isn't amazingly better, it's mostly just tradeoffs. Instead of getting hotter than a jet engine, it needs a few starts to get around a video chip issue that allegedly only affected the G3 iBooks (a major source of frustration for me a few minutes ago). Both laptops are somewhat bowed on top, allegedly part of the design of the laptop, but... that would be a very bizarre choice if so. The video chip, while this time a much more powerful Mobility Radeon 9550 (essentially a downclocked Radeon 9600, a card that has both CoreImage and Quartz Extreme), is gimped with only 32 megabytes of VRAM. And for some reason... actually, let me split this off into another paragraph.

What the hell are these specs, Stevo? The gigahertz and a half 7447a is pretty nice, and I really appreciate the 1.5GB of RAM (just a shame I couldn't do 2.5GB -- product differentiation would amount to being able to use all 4GB addressable by a 32-bit processor for the PowerBook G4s), even the sound capabilities are pretty nice for a laptop, especially a 2000s laptop. But like... seriously? 512K cache, when the PowerBook G3 from 1999 had a 1MB cache? Using a 7447a instead of a 7457/58 for the L3 cache? A 4200RPM (not even 5400) IDE hard drive in 2005 when the 2000 Power Mac G4 had a 7200RPM hard drive?! I know this laptop was meant for college kids who couldn't afford a PowerBook G4, but... come on, you could have at least had certain specs on par with a five year old laptop! Plus, it being IDE makes replacing the drive with an SSD an even worse experience than it already was.

As for the iBook G3, a Radeon 7500 is pretty weak. It actually does warrant being a 32MB video chip, and I'm cool with that, but it would have been so much better to have been a Radeon 8500. I wouldn't have expected a GeForce4 Ti, that would have been ridiculous, but the 8500 is essentially the baseline of good Mac OS 9 video cards, and as (as far as I can tell) the very last computer that can boot Mac OS 9, it's not like they weren't already around.

And damn, this thing is not silent. Not in terms of the fans, they're actually pretty quiet and don't kick on until they're direly needed (could be a benefit or a drawback, you decide), but in terms of the clacky keyboard (which I actually like but you can not use this thing near anything sleeping and not be afraid of waking them up) and loud as a steam locomotive trackpad button. Singular button. In 2005. You still need to control-click in two thousand and goddamn five, a whole twenty one years after the mid-'80s "most people have never owned a personal computer with a mouse before, if one at all" context in which it débuted. I mean, if you don't just use a USB mouse, taking up one of your two USB ports. I wonder if they ever made FireWire or Ethernet mouses; this laptop only has 100Mb Ethernet, which is pretty useless besides local file transfer... which you have other, faster, and more convenient options for now.

Also, if you ever wondered when Apple started their "our computers are too good for your peasant hands to repair" bullshit... well, that would probably be the iMac in August 1998, but the Snow iBooks are atrocious. Hundreds of steps both ways in order to do something as simple as reseat the video cable or switch out the dead hard drive. I really have to wonder how many hundreds of hours of people's lives were lost to repairing the Snow iBooks, and I hope that if you're reading this and have one that it's not very many. I've personally had decent luck with mine, but I know that due to entropy geting us all that I'll have to participate in the 120-step tango at some point, and I won't be extremely happy about it.

At least I'll be able to bunp that VRAM up to 64MB when I get to it. And swap out this 4200RPM spinner for an SSD...

I don't want to scare people off, these are still very good laptops. I just think they're such huge wastes of potential. By 2005, Apple was trying to do its best to kill PowerPC --- and IBM was not helping on that, hostile to producing a chip for anything but workstations and servers. If they really stood by their $1300 laptop, they would have packed it with tons of excellent technology that would have ensured it lasted all the while being an amazing laptop in the meantime. Look back just five years earlier --- the Power Macintosh G4 was faster clock gor clock than a Pentium III while being able to accept a gargantuan two gigabytes of RAM --- eight typical Wintel computers' worth. I know it's possible --- the PowerBook series (G3, Firewire, and G4) had plenty of these things. I have a Dell Optiplex GX1 that I really like that came with 128MB RAM standard, and only let you shove in 768MB, which was insane in 1999 but pales in comparison to the Mac. They could have done that again if they wanted. And, like, the iMac G5 had SATA, and the 7447a wasn't exactly an old processor.

 

By 2005, though, the PowerPC Mac, while being an excellent computer for its time, was no longer a market leader in pushing specs and futureproofing, but was more in line with its' Intel contemporaries. And that's in my opinion one of the wrong turns in the road in the history of computing, and one of the biggest shames thereof.

Ah well, I can at least love the end product to death, even if I hate it and what it represents.

In defense of the lowly little Blackbird

This blog is supposed to be about PowerPC Apple hardware, but I figured that I could quickly say this while writing the post about the iMac G5 I'm using to try to help the reputation of the Blackbird, a motherboard I really think doesn't get the credit it deserves even from POWER people.

Blackbird, for those who don't know (maybe you got here from a Google search?), is a Micro ATX motherboard manufactured by Raptor Computing Systems in Texas that uses IBM POWER9 CPUs. It's sort of marketed as being in between a normal desktop computer and a workstation, and you could maybe also use it as a server if you were just wanting to do something small.

It's also the cheapest computer in RCS' range, compared to the Talos II actual server/crazy-powerful workstation computer and the Talos II Lite normal workstation computer. Most comparisons tend to downplay this, saying it's maybe 10% more expensive, but that's only for the motherboard itself. TIIL is about $2000 for the motherboard alone, compared to $1700 for the Blackbird -- and other E-ATX components don't come cheap. I just bought a Rosewill Line-M case for my Blackbird build and it cost me $34, with several other Micro ATX cases in that price range. On the other hand, I had a look on Newegg and the cheapest E-ATX cases I could find were over $100, besides the one case that was on sale for $99. Just combining those two parts -- the other parts are compatible between each other, the price difference comes out to $317.40 -- that's before taxes, which scale to the price of the items. A quick and dirty estimate brings that up to $342.79. That's enough to get you a GPU, RAM, and an SSD if you get them second-hand.

TIIL's main feature that is generally brought up as the tipping factor is its ability to use 18- and 22-core CPUs. It's true that Blackbird can only handle 4- and 8-core processors due to its less powerful component power supply electronics, but 4- and 8-core processors are perfectly usable -- 4-cores without any multithreading at all are usable too, see the Intel i5-6600K. An 18-core processor is $2,069 (nice), which is the price of a whole new Blackbird. $4,353 nets you 22 cores. Comparing a 4- or 8-core Blackbird to a 18- or 22-core Talos II Lite gets the number even more ridiculous; without RAM, a GPU, or anything else that makes it a functional computer, the 4-core to 18-core price difference is $1,972.67 -- the 8-core to 22-core difference is $4,089.80. Enough to build several more computers, or outfit your Blackbird with 64 gigabytes of RAM and a high-end RX card, or pay your student loans.

They're also a lot physically smaller. Thinner, lighter, and shorter by square inches, they are much more portable -- especially in a case like the Cooler Master Q300P, a case I think is really appropriate for the computer as it provides a very Power Macintosh-like form factor. Holding my Line-M up to my Sawtooth, Micro ATX is pretty much the exact same size as the main case without the handles. I also have right next to it an E-ATX case my sister gave me, and it dwarfs it. I could probably put the MATX case inside of the other one. They're bulky and heavy and really inconvenient, and you don't really even get the advantages of a full Talos II computer besides the $2,069 18-core processor and more RAM slots (as if the 256 GB that the Blackbird supplies is insufficient for typical tasks) that for many just isn't a justifiable purchase.

I ran the numbers on a hypothetical full build, by the way, which with a Radeon HD 6990 GPU for optional big-endian capability, is $800 apart. $2,600 for the Blackbird, $3,400 for the Talos II Lite with an 8-core CPU.

I just can't see the normal person justifying that amount of money. For 90% of people, the Blackbird is going to be your best bet. It's on par or better than a Core i7, when most people use a Core i5. Don't get me wrong, TIIL definitely has a spot to fill, and there are definitely people for whom it's worth it. But those people already know why they need it, and aren't looking at "Which RCS mainboard should I go with?" articles.