PowerMac G4

2 Articles

Giving A Power Mac G4 A USB Upgrade, For Free!

June 10, 2026 by 14 Comments

At various times in the history of desktop computing, the market has stubbornly refused to follow the path dictated for it by a dominant manufacturer. IBM’s move to MCA in their PS/2 line is one of many examples. Another is Apple’s take on USB a couple of decades ago, when their view of the future lay with Firewire 800. [Pierre Dandumont] has revisited a Power Mac G4 from that era and unleashed what Apple never did back in the day: a USB 2.0 port. (French language, Google Translate).

The hack lies in Apple shipping the machine with an NEC USB 2.0 controller, but only using it for USB 1.1. A PowerPC Linux distro will happily use it for USB 2.0, but Mac OS refused. Replacing the BIOS ROM with an image designed for the same Mac without Firewire 800 cured the problem, but at the expense of being so we’re told irreversible.

An obscure set of Macs from the early 2000s with an odd combination of hardware and OS may not count for much in 2026, but back in the day having USB 2.0 was a big deal and this would really have mattered. We like it that he put this together, even if the chances of having a G4 on the Hackaday desktop probably isn’t too high.

This isn’t the first USB hack we’ve seen for a PowerMac G4.

Adding USB-C (Kinda) To A PowerMac G4

February 15, 2025 by 10 Comments

For those who’ve never bitten the Apple, the PowerMac G4 was a blue-tinted desktop Macintosh offered from 1999 to 2004. At the time, the machines were plenty fast — being advertised as the first “personal supercomputer” when they hit the market. But Father Time is particularly harsh on silicon, so they’re properly archaic by modern standards.

As such, the rear panel of one of these machines is hardly where you’d expect to run into a functional USB-C port. But thanks to the efforts of [Dandu], old has officially met new. Critics will note that it’s not real USB-C, and instead uses USB 2.0 with the more modern connector. That’s true, but considering how many commercial devices we run into that are still using the same trick, we’ll give it a pass.

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