The iMac G3 is an absolute icon of industrial design, as (or perhaps more) era-defining than the Mac Classic before it. In the modern day, if your old iMac even boots, well, you can’t do much with it. [Rick Norcross] got a hold of a dead (hopefully irreparable) specimen, and stuffed a modern PC inside of it.
From the outside, it’s suprizingly hard to tell. Of course the CRT had to go, replaced with a 15″ ELO panel that fits well after being de-bezeled. (If its resolution is only 1024 x 768, well, it’s also only 15″, and that pixel density matches the case.) An M-ATX motherboard squeezes right in, above a modular PSU. Cooling comes from a 140 mm case fan placed under the original handle. Of course you can’t have an old Mac without a startup chime, and [Rick] obliges by including an Adafruit FX board wired to the internal speakers, set to chime on power-up while the PC components are booting.
These sorts of mods have proven controversial in the past– certainly there’s good reason to want to preserve aging hardware–but perhaps with this generation of iMac it won’t raise the same ire as when someone guts a Mac Classic. We’ve seen the same treatment given to a G4 iMac, but somehow the lamp doesn’t quite have the same place in our hearts as the redoubtable jellybean.
Neat case, shame the CRT was thrown out
Yeah, think same. Unfortunately, people nolonger know how to handle CRT technology.
If only AMOLED panels or laser-based panels would be available finally.
The technological progress is so slow. LCD, TFT.. Such vintage technologies. Sigh.
They were around when I was a kid, already.
Well, very early in my career I learned how to repair CRT televisions and monitors, I’d have preferred to keep it too, but they take up so much space and are pretty much all knackered now with low emission, soggy focus and filled with unobtainable parts so even if the scan rates were compatible, I’d probably accept a vaguely period correct resolution and format TFT.
If the CRT was already bad, no loss there as it’s next to impossible to repair CRT. If it was still working, I would have kept it in case someone local needs a replacement CRT
I have a similar machine, mine is broken too, due to the heat and design issues they are all basically dying and with no schematics at hand if the CRT driving board is toast (like mine) you are pretty limited, my next step is to figure out if I can fit one of these CRT boards from aliexpress in it
OMG so amazing.Such an interesting hack!
“The iMac G3 is an absolute icon of industrial design” that’s up for debate, but it’s shape and colors are certainly fun and recognizable. But for many people of today, it looks like a silly prison TV with a build in DVD player and a keyboard.
A real absolute icon is the “floppy disk” or 3.5″ diskette, it is not only iconic as representing the era it was used in, it is still used as an actual icon today. The irony is that the G3 did not support that icon by default, forcing users to buy an external drive to suit their needs. Ruining the “clean desktop policy” of the G3 concept. The added irony is that the “floppy” is still around and the revolutionary CD the G3 hosted is gradually being forgotten.
Not quite. The iMac gave birth to USB floppy drives, essentially! 😃
USB floppy drive came along a few years after some Macintosh ditched floppy disk drive. I got a Powerbook Duo 280c, the Duo line were the first without internal disk drive.
That was rather normal for notebooks, though.
The floppy has gone past iconic. Centuries hence, when the last living cyborg on the edge of the oort cloud uploads their consciousness into holographic crystal media, the final thought recorded by the process will be “why does the button look like that?” 💾
Yet, ironically, the CD is still in production and the floppy is not.
I’m in the middle of putting a custom computer into an original G3 iBook case at the moment. I guess there’s something about these old Apple designs that’s really A-peal-ing!
I’ll show myself out…