Motorola's hugely impressive G3 processor had given birth to the stunning Blue&White G3 PowerMac. Released in two flavours (as well as at several speeds) the launch of the even faster G4, while keeping the flame alive, didn't really set the world alight from a design perspective. Available with either PCI graphics (the Yikes! machines) or the newer AGP graphics (the Sawtooth machines) the G4's were physically identical from an external point of view but the Sawtooth machines were generally faster and offered nice features like being able to accept an AirPort card and being able to boot from external FireWire devices (although both the Yikes! and Sawtooth machines could boot from external USB devices)

With little more than a paint job (replacing the blue and white colouring with graphite gray, silver and transparent), the G4 PowerMac's real strength lay in what was under the hood. The G3 was a powerful piece of processing technology but the G4 managed to double performance at the same clock rate (and was generally rated at three times the performance of a similarly clocked Intel Pentium III). This did not come without it's problems, and while cooling and technical issues were all handled by Apple's hardware gurus, the US government proved to be a totally new and different affair. Clocking in at anywhere between 0.8 and 3.2 billion floating point operations a second, the machine was technically classed (in 1999) as a supercomputer. Of course the export of supercomputers to other countries was highly restricted at the time.

The G4 also suffered other bizarre misfortunes with the biggest, for customers, being the speed reduction to 350MHz (for the Yikes! machines - the Sawtooth models were reduced from 450MHz to 400MHz, with the 450MHz models replacing the delayed 500MHz models). What was even more alarming was that the price didn't follow suit and customers buying machines between mid-October and mid-February the following year were no doubt delighted to pay the same amount for a slower machine.

Whatever its speed issues, the G4 was still a very powerful piece of equipment and users found that it easily out-paced the older G3 machines and every other desktop machine available (Apple or otherwise). With optional ZIP drives, optional DVD drives, various processor upgrades (eventually the line would offer dual 1GHz systems), FireWire and USB, and the ability to accept up to 1.5Gb of RAM, the G4s would be around for a very long time to come and in a variety of guises.

Ahh the G4. I'd been hunting for one of these for a while and, while readily available via eBay and the like, most G4's always came up against that most annoying of walls: price. Being just one step down from the current (at time of writing) top-of-the-line G5 machines, the G4 is certainly not just a museum curio for the hobbyist, instead being a machine more than capable of handling just about anything that the Mac community can throw at it.

My own machine was certainly no extreme machine but coming in at 400MHz it was certainly a step up from the Mac 128 (although there have been quite a few machines that have arrived in the museum in between). Initially I though I'd ended up with a Yikes! PCI machine (this is how it was advertised) but a look under the hood soon showed that this was actually the more powerful Sawtooth version with AGP and an AirPort antennae fitted (no AirPort card but that's hardly the end of the world).

Arriving with 192Mb RAM (then upped to 320Mb) and a 10Gb hard drive, this machine meant business even if it did arrive with OS9.1 instead of the advertised 10.2 - these are small insignificant issues though. Despite the paint job though, the G4 is very much the same as the B&W G3 with the same swing out motherboard design and internal layout. So similar in fact that I swapped my G3's CD/DVD combo drive for the G4's DVD-ROM - well, the G3 was never really going to need it was it? A ZIP drive came as part of the deal and, unlike the 8600, it was clearly on display and had the proper drive bezel fitted.

Performance wise, running OS9.1, it's a beast of a machine that eats just about anything you can throw at it. DVD playback fullscreen at 1280x1024? No problem. Virtual PC running Windows 2000? OK. Although it's harsh to make the comparrison (and seems almost nasty to make the following statement), the G4 is a machine which is more than capable in the current IT world. Don't get me wrong, the old PowerMacs, PowerBooks and 68K machines are excellent but they're starting to look a little long in the tooth in a world of multi-MBps broadband connections, dual layer DVD writers etc. the G4 still kicks. In fact it not so much still kicks and beats the living c&*p out of you.

Would I advise one? From a technical point of view there's no question about it but until they start to age then the price will probably be a bit on the high side for all but the dedicated (who will probably already have a G4 as their main machine anyway). If you do come across one at a bargain price price - take it. Trust me, you won't be disappointed.