IMac Reborn With Present-day Parts

[Paul] spent his summer bringing an iMac G3 into this decade. There’s plenty of room to work with since he removed the CRT which originally occupied most of the computer’s space. The final project is much more powerful and since he preserved most of the metal mounting parts inside it remains quite strong.

He started by swapping flat screen monitors with his Grandma (who incidentally runs Linux… nice!). She had a 15″ model which would fit nicely in the case so he upgraded her to 17″ and took the old one. With bezel removed it fits perfectly where to old tube had been. Next comes the power supply. It’s mounted on the bracket which held the back of the tube, with a bit of metal removed to clear the air intake. To mount the motherboard he fabricated a bracket at one end where the iMac’s stage drops away. In retrospect he wishes he had rotated the board to make the I/O panel more accessible. The hard drive mounts on the original carriage, and he did some creative gluing to make his replacement DVD drive align with the original optical drive opening. The finished product looks great from the front and sides, with the cables running out the back as the only indication that it’s had some major work done on it.

20 thoughts on “IMac Reborn With Present-day Parts

  1. As an upgrade to the iMac it doesn’t keep the reason,touch and feel of an iMac if you know how great it used to be.

    As a mod for a nice all in one computer with atx psu and motherboard,i’d say yeah!!!

    Personally i have an iMac G3 500mhz Slot and it’s all i need to use along my iPad,i also have a Quad Core PC that is lost in dust.

    i have repeatedly though of swapping the G3’s Screen with an LCD,yeah it looks excellent with an LCD,but it will lose its G3 Feeling and i want to keep the PSU which will require 2 Phases of 24V AC to do ao.

  2. Regardless of what you think of Apple as a company, the original Imac was a pretty outstanding piece of industrial design- this alone has extended its daily usefulness as a ‘thing’ to the present day for casual users e.g. someone’s gramma.

    It’s really nice to see someone resurrecting one like this.

      1. @macona: Better check your history.

        In the 90’s Apple nearly bought it; Apple’s BOD ditched Steve Jobs, opened the OS and firmware to Mac-cloners and the company tanked. They lost money from 1985 to 1997. It was just this side of bankrupt when they somehow turned the company around.

        Ironically, you can thank Microsoft investing 150M in the company in 1997 along with Steve Jobs’ appearance with the iMac and OSX. Then iTunes was added a little later and Apple profits exploded.

  3. I’ve seen people giving these things away (iMacs, unmodded of course) on Craigslist, this might be fun. @Matt – I agree, it was a very innovative design at the time when everything was square and grey.

      1. Actually, nope to your nope.
        Having worked in Apple sales and support 1996-1999, and also being an Apple certified technician at the time, we were all aware of the USD$150 million deal in which Microsoft bought non voting stock in Apple, agreed to continue to supply MS Office on the MacOS platform, and the deal was also settlement of the Quicktime video code infringement lawsuit.
        Those were the days… I remember installing Mach Microkernel PPC-Linux on the shop’s Nubus Powermac6100/66… and I still have the pre-release Rhapsody (=rebadged newly acquired NextSTEP) release lying around somewhere for x86 before it was ported to PPC and then back to x86…

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