You're wrong, my 32-bit Core Duo MBP is running 10.6 fine.

Ah. I stand corrected.

Yeah. I could get similarly-specified ordinary PCs for maybe half the price. The only Macintosh I have is an iMac G3 with Mac OS X 10.1.

Some people said 10.0 and 10.1 were still beta like systems.

10.1 was fine 10.0 had a few problems which people carried on to 10.1 and then started a big rave about 10.1 also having problems.

Firstly, I can't find downloads for any higher PPC versions on BetaArchive (except 10.4 I think is on there), and secondly I don't think my G3 supports much higher.

The G3 supports 10.0 - 10.3 natively and 10.4 via XPostFacto. I also never remember having an issue with 10.1 back when I used that as my primary operating system.

Do you mean 10.5? 10.4 supports G3s just fine.

XPostFacto is not needed at all with G3. It doesn't support x86.

I think that if the price is right - go for it. These PowerBooks will become collector's items soon. I still have a PowerMac G5 running Tiger in the basement and have no problems. In fact, I love using it because it feels so nostalgic. Be careful with G5's, however, they run very hot and may sound like jets flying by. G4's are slower but have no heating issues.

10.4 doesn't support older G3s, there's a cutoff:
http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPo ... ility.html

XPostFacto actually doesn't work at all with 10.5 last I researched due to OpenFirmware incompatibilities.

My iMac G3 has 192 MB of RAM and a 9 GB hard disk (it's a slot-loading model) but I'm not sure of the exact CPU version. I have Mac OS X 10.1 on it (it boots incredibly slowly), but could I run up to 10.3 on it? I'm guessing the CPU model matters.

Yes, you should be able to run 10.3 fine on that.

I don't think HTML5 is CPU dependant. This is a software function of the browser. If the browser is supported (Safari 5.0.2) on PPC then you have HTML5 support.

I run lots of PPC 12" laptops using 10.5.8 with no issues, and they have HTML5 support. They are slower then intel laptops but they get the job done.

Cheers

I was given someone's old Powerbook G4 15" (I believe it was 1.67GHz) and it worked surprisingly well with Leopard for a 5 or 6 year old computer.
The latest iTunes and Safari installed fine and so did iWork and iLife '09, and Office 2008.
Photoshop CS4 was actually pretty fast (!) but I didn't get the chance to use it much.

The only problems I encountered were on websites with Flash or Silverlight.
Hulu didn't work because the very latest version of Flash Player doesn't support PowerPC processors, and YouTube was choppy and caused the fans to run full blast.
And Netflix streaming/Silverlight doesn't work at all.

Overall, it would make a decent computer, provided that I had another (Intel) computer around for most of the time.
And at <$200 for a decent one it's worth a try.

does anybody know what was the very last PPC laptop just before they released the first Intel based one please ?

Back when PPC was relavant, Apple was constantly touting its superiority over x86 platforms by running Photoshop benchmarks, video encoding tests and the like.



12" PowerBook G4 - 1.5GHz, 64MB GeForce FX5200 - PowerBook6,8
15" PowerBook G4 - 1.67GHz, 128MB ATI Radeon 9700 - PowerBook5,8
17" PowerBook G4 - 1.67GHz, 128MB ATI Radeon 9700 - PowerBook5,9

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Macs of that era saw widespread use in the various creative industries and hardly elsewhere as they were a poor value for money if one just wanted, say, a machine for net surfing or using e-mail.

The older PowerPC apples are only really good for mucking around on or as a hobby. The latest OS that works on powerpc architecture is 10.4 Tiger (released in 2005 -- 6/7 years ago) and support for 10.4 is getting pretty thin on the ground.

Firefox is not supported in anything less than 10.5 and hasn't been for a while, and that is open source software, commercial software is even worse. The latest version of Microsoft Office that works is 2008, whereas compared with Windows, Office 2010 only needs XP (released in 2001 -- 10/11 years old) Mac OS is a fair bit different to Windows in terms of software publishers continuing to support their programs on older OS's.

So for a main computer, powerpc architecture is dead in the water and x86 Intel architecture is really the only way to go.
Unfortunately Apples are expensive (and always have been comparitively).

I think that using an old PowerPC is always good... that's a RISC platform. If you like computer engineering, it's a must to.
But, in the other side, with an PowerPC, you can't do any upgrade.

I have a PowerMac G3 Blue and White (PPC G3 350Mhz) here, that works as a storage server (exporting a 1TB Sata disk throw the network - using Apple File Protocol) and it works like a charm. And I have a Dell Dimension (Pentium III 600Mhz), as a network router, using FreeBSD.

So, old machines is great for some stuffs, and for learning how it work (example, my PPC G3 350 Mhz, is faster then my Pentium III 600Mhz).

You can run old applications, old games (I love to play some games in my PowerMac using Mac OS 9.2.2).

But, if you want something for using day after day, you will be very disappointed. No security update, no new software (a lot of new softwares is Intel Only) and the list go on...

Well, that depends. It is great for running Tiger, but if it is running Leopard, you have much less
compatibility and it is much slower. In Tiger, you can also add other OSes, such as Linux and betas.