We're not talking about restoring a vintage car here. This is a very strange use of time, money, resources, etc.

There are virtually no upgrades available for the MDD G4 towers, yet they're going to bother upgrading the original iMac AND require running XPostFacto to get it to OS X?

Bizzaro!

Another note about those machines. The early iMacs developed video glitches with the graphics card attached to the MB. It required a very expensive replacement. I personally had to have 2 fixed. When the third one died, we trashed it for a new machine.

Don't forget.. .even if you upgrade your CPU to a [not-so-screaming] G4 400Mhz, you'll still be running a 66Mhz bus and RAM, an ATA-3 (16MB/s) hard drive controller, and an OLD video chipset. These are all very important factors in your machines performance.

But for $99, it might not be all that bad to squeeze an extra year of life out of an old machine for someone. At least it is priced reasonably.

More reasonable than those 500$ CPU ONLY upgrades for the Sawtooth. There is no wai in hell I would pump more money into a sawtooth. But still...I see no point in paying a buck for a machine like this and then another buck for a processor upgrade that is only slightly better....

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Tiger wrote:
We're not talking about restoring a vintage car here. ... yet they're going to bother upgrading the original iMac AND require running XPostFacto to get it to OS X?

Actually, the imac upgrade technology has existed for years. The product news is that it is now a simple kit... due to the supply of CPU cards and CPUs at a very low price. The fact is that there are still very many of these older systems out there, and users want to boost the speed, but don't want to bury hundreds of dollars.

Now if they would just manufacture a G4 upgrade for my IIsi, I'd be all over that!

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Tiger wrote:
We're not talking about restoring a vintage car here. This is a very strange use of time, money, resources, etc.

There are virtually no upgrades available for the MDD G4 towers, yet they're going to bother upgrading the original iMac AND require running XPostFacto to get it to OS X?

Bizzaro!

You only need XPostFacto for Tiger. Panther should work fine normally. Apple does not officially support Tiger on pre-FireWire machines.

And a Bondi iMac is so much better than any vintage car...

You can pick up iMac 400s for under a $100 on eBay all day long.

Yes , but you would be surprised how many schools use iMacs and would appreciate any speed increase they could get. These were always meant to be cheap consumer model computers , last surprisingly well and meet the basic needs of institutions / schools that have very limited resources. These are now viable machines for these places to buy secondhand and upgrade to a reasonable level for a few hundred dollars .Similarly aged Dells would have been junked two years ago.I would rather see schools using a room full of Macs than Dells anyday