If you’re still rocking a PowerPC Mac with a G3, G4 or G5 processor running OS X Tiger and you’re willing to try the new Firefox 4.0, you’re out of luck.With the latest major update to their Windows / Mac / Linux browser, Mozilla dropped support for Mac OS X 10.4 and PowerPC architecture, and while it’s pretty obvious that, going forward, older machines and operating systems will be. So make the jump and keep your Power Mac relevant. Our software is open-source, written by Power Mac users and maintained by Power Mac users, incorporating our custom new PowerPC-only features plus the latest bug fixes, security improvements and all the powerful technology underlying Mozilla Firefox. This was my first Hackintosh in a vintage Apple housing. The I/O shield comes from an old Digitalis HTPC housing. Mainboard: Gigabyte Z86MX-UD2H-B3 Details. It is a PowerPC specific port of Mozilla (a.k.a. Firefox) that is optimized for G3, G5, and two varieties of G4 CPUs. The current version is 31.4.0, and I used it with QuickTime Enabler v.120 installed, which lets TFF use QuickTime to display video. The Power Mac G5 is a series of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. From 2003 to 2006 as part of the Power Mac series. When introduced, it was the most powerful computer in Apple's Macintosh lineup, and was marketed by the company as the world's first 64-bit desktop computer. It was also the first desktop computer from Apple to use an anodized aluminum.

After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late ’90s, he famously simplified the company’s product line by drawing a four-product grid: consumer desktop (the bulbous, brightly colored G3 iMac), consumer laptop (then, just an empty space), professional desktop (the Power Mac, first the blue-and-white G3 and then the G4), and professional laptop (the PowerBook).

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There was no consumer laptop in Apple’s product line until the iBook was announced. PowerBooks were expensive. And as for that consumer desktop, the G3 iMac was a wild success¹, but for years the real Mac users looked down on it as a weird, underpowered toy that wasn’t suited for getting real work done².

In this context, it’s easy to underestimate just how much importance the professional Mac tower had in the mind of the Mac world back in the day. As defined by the standards of the 90s and early 2000s, these were real computers—boxes you could open up and swap hard drives, install RAM, stick in expansion cards, maybe even upgrade the processor itself. Time and trends and Apple’s own predilections have led us to a world, two decades later, where the only Mac that fits these criteria starts at $6,000, but back then the desktop tower was the Mac. The one that mattered.³

In the summer of 2003, Apple introduced an entirely new Mac tower, one that traded the cute colorful plastic of the Power Mac G3 and the more subdued gray and silver plastic of the Power Mac G4 for a more serious industrial design, clad in aluminum. Illustrator for mac os torrent. In the early 2000s, colorful computers were for consumers and monochrome computers were for serious computer users.⁴

The Power Mac G5 design represented the high-end Mac tower for a decade, keeping its distinctive look outside while adapting and changing on the inside. It survived the Intel transition. The G5 design, with a front panel punched so full of holes that it was 65 percent aluminum and 35 percent air, was so logical for a computer packed full of hot, high-powered components that after a six year hiatus, Apple brought back a Mac Pro that is deeply inspired by the design of the original. Like its predecessor, the 2019 Mac Pro also looks like nothing more than a giant box grater.

An executive briefing

The Power Mac G5 was announced at WWDC in 2003 as “the world’s fastest personal computer.” Steve Jobs pointed out it was also the first 64-bit processor in a desktop computer, proudly trumpeting Apple’s partnership with IBM to create the G5 processor, which was replacing the Motorola-built PowerPC G4 at the top of Apple’s product line.

Apple was proud of the hardware design, so proud that I managed to score a hands-on briefing where I could walk through the design decisions with Apple execs for a cover story in Macworld. Macworld Expo in New York was coming up, so the only time we could meet was on the afternoon of July 3, the day before the long Independence Day weekend.

My wife and our one-year-old daughter and I were driving down to L.A. for the weekend, so we ended up stopping at Infinite Loop on the way south. A very nice Apple P.R. person (I wish I could remember who she was!) took them to the Company Store while I went into the executive briefing center. My daughter ended up with a new Apple onesie out of the deal.

The briefing was one for the books. Greg Jozwiak—who still frequently takes to the stage at Apple events—represented product marketing and Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s SVP of hardware engineering was there for the engineering side. For an hour, we stood around an opened-up G5 and walked through every little corner of that tower, as they told story after story about why particular design decisions had been made.

Today, that would be a podcast interview, and maybe a YouTube video. Back then, it generated three pages of photos showing both sides of the G5 motherboard, the inside of the case, and the front and back of the computer’s exterior, complete with quotes from both of them. It was an unusual way to do that story, right down to my insistence that we quote them at length and refer to them by their nicknames, Joz and Ruby.

With 17 years of hindsight, the thing that sticks out the most about the G5’s design is just how obsessed it was about moving air around. Consider the two pro Macs that bracket this design: the previous tower, the final Power Mac G4, was nicknamed the “wind tunnel” because of its loud, aggressive fan noise. The 2013 Mac Pro, on the other hand, famously failed because it couldn’t keep its components cool enough, leading Apple into a “thermal corner” from which it couldn’t escape.

The G5 was all about moving air around intelligently and quietly. In the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs boasts about how it’s got nine fans, but you won’t hear them because they’re all individually computer controlled. If you took off the metal door on the outside of the G5, you’d be prompted by a clear plastic second door, this one there to keep the entire thermal container sealed. The power supply, processors, PCI cards, and storage bay were all separate air zones, moving from front to back.

Over the years, the airflow design on the inside changed as components changed, but the premise remained the same: Keep moving air through this thing so it can keep doing its job. It’s something the 2019 Mac Pro does, too. It’s a lesson learned from the Power Mac G5.

Bunny suits and betrayal

Don’t make Steve Jobs look like a fool. You will regret it.

Given the history between Jobs and IBM, it’s quite a thing to consider just how much praise Jobs and Apple lavished on IBM during the launch of the Power Mac G5.

The truth is, when Jobs returned to Apple he found the company in a vulnerable position when it came to Mac processors. The PowerPC chip architecture used in every Mac was a constant sore spot. It’s not quite fair to say Macs were always slower than comparable PCs running Intel processors, but they frequently were—and even when they weren’t, they often lagged behind in sheer clock speed. Try explaining to someone that a 1.5GHz Motorola G4 processor is actually faster than a 1.7 GHz Intel processor—either they won’t believe you because one number is larger than the other, or their eyes will just glaze over in boredom. (It happened on stage at Macworld Expo New York once. True story.)

Here’s what I wrote back in 2003:

Anyone who’s paid attention to the competitive world of desktop computers has noticed that as PC chip makers Intel and AMD have accelerated their chips to incredibly high clock speeds, the G4 has lagged behind. Lately, even Apple seemed to stop protesting that the gap was purely mathematical and not real.

Apple ended up hitching the future of Mac chip development to IBM, its other PowerPC alliance partner. IBM had been focusing on high-end workstation processors, and that seemed like a good fit for the Power Mac line, at least. Then Apple went to w

Firefox For Power Mac G5