We’re an outmoded crew here at the Anthology of Hypertext. Almost every word that has been published here so far has been written and edited on a 9-year-old iMac G3. [The keyboard was replaced with [an Apple aluminium one](http://apple.com/keyboard/) and the mouse by a [Mus2 from Art. Lebedev.](http://artlebedev.com/everything/mus2/) ] The question people ask me when I tell them just how old my computer is probably the one you’re thinking of now, which is:

I don’t get why the hell you would want a computer that is so old and slow; why don’t you get yourself something faster?

The question is not ‘why do you want something that old?’ but rather: Why would I want anything newer? This computer serves my purposes perfectly well. It would be nice to be able to run Mac OS X Leopard and run all the latest software, but for somebody like me whose heaviest task is editing a photo taken with a point-and-shoot camera, I’ve found that this computer is quite powerful enough.

Eventually, though, it’s going to get left behind, as the PowerPC is gradually being abandoned by software developers. But even when the last piece of software that I use has ended PowerPC support, I can still use this machine by installing some variant of Linux on it, probably Fedora.

And when it does reach the stage where I decide it’s time for a new desktop computer, I’ll probably replace it with another Mac: probably an iMac G4, which I think is one of the best-looking computers of all time. By that time, the price of those machines will probably have dropped to around the £30 mark, which is the price that I picked up this machine for.

I’m not alone: there are a whole group of people using older Macs for their work over at Low End Mac, and high-profile bloggers such as Steven Frank and Grant Hutchinson have held on to their older Apple technology: both of them are Newton users.

It works out to be considerably cheaper overall to use an older Mac and replace it more often than to buy a new one every 3 years. Consider that the cost of an old Mac is about £100 if you get one that’s about 5 years old, depending on the specifications. The cheapest Mac from Apple is the Mac Mini, which is £500. If you keep the older computer for even just a year, then by the time you replace that Mac mini in three years, you’ll still come out £200 better off. It’s only if you decide to keep that Mac for over five years that you begin to beat the value of the older Mac—and five years is a much longer time than most people keep their computers.

But the reasons for keeping hold of your old Macs are more than just financial. They’re also great computers, just like any Macintosh.

Is it slow? Well, here’s a simple benchmark test comparison: my father’s computer has a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor inside it. My iMac looks positively weedy in comparison: a mere 500MHz G3. Boot time for Vista on the Intel is 55 seconds. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on the G3? 5 seconds quicker. Thanks to Mac OS X’s extremely optimized performance since 10.3, a lowly computer like mine can easily compete with a PC zealot’s highest-specced desktop for experienced performance.

Low-end Macs clearly aren’t for everyone, though. If you’re doing high-end production work in a media studio, don’t even bother thinking about switching to using older machines: there’s definitely not enough power inside even a last-generation PowerPC Mac for you to be as productive as possible. If you’re seriously thinking about getting a PowerPC Mac today, make sure you get the low-down from someone else in your profession who uses a Mac of similar specification. If you can’t find one, either a) risk it, and put it back on eBay if it’s not fast enough, or b) don’t even bother.

For me, though, I couldn’t be happier with my G3. There are some things I’d like it to be able to do which it can’t, but overall, it’s a very fun experience trying to hack things to work right. Macs are fun to hack, and fun to use, and that’s why I use them.