[rescue] G4 pricing

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 08:34:10AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> And cracking the case is not hard at all - when I upgraded my Mini at work
> to 1G recently (from 512, which I"d upgraded from the factory 256), I
> "cracked" the case using a metal PCI slot cover.

Before the Intel Macs started to ship, a friend of mine in the used Mac
business was offered a bunch of G4 machines, I think they were called
graphite. The ones that were a second version Blue and White G3 with a
G4 slapped into them with no other changes.

I told him they were not worth more than $100 each. My reasoning was that
in order to sell them, he would have to upgrade them to somewhat modern
specs, e.g. 256m or 512m RAM, a new hard drive. 

Then a Mac Mini with a 1.2 gHz CPU cost about $700 here. His upgrades
would have cost him around $250. DDR ram is cheap here, PC133 SDRAM is 
almost twice the price.

He'd then have to add in his profit, take the risk of warrantying them
etc. Meanwhile the $700 Mini included a copy of Tiger, iLife and a year
warranty. The 1.4gHz one with 512m RAM and an 80gig HD, was about $150
more than the 1.2gHz.

He told me that the big reason someone would want to buy a graphite G4
over a Mini was the graphics. That made no sense IMHO as no graphics card
that was in a five year old Macintosh was better than the graphics
in the Mini.

Another point was that the Mini has USB 2 ports, the old machines had USB 1.
I've since found out the hard way that PCI USB 2 cards that support anything
besides a keyboard and mouse are impossible to get in Israel.

Firewire stuff is just about gone here. Since Apple was the only company that
used it for anything except video cameras, it never took off in the local
PC market.

Geoff.


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