[Fsuk-manchester] Re: [Fsfe-uk] Mac OS X refund

[Richard Smedley]

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 08:26 +0000, Noah Slater wrote:
> >      2) not upgradable/tweekable,
> > 
> >    Tell that to my laptop running a bigger hard disk and more memory than
> >    Apple shipped it with! If you want to put new gfx cards or processors in,
> >    sure, go buy a noname intel box.
> 
> Sure, you can put in a new hard disk and memory, but that's about
> all you can do. You cant replace the mainboard, processors, PSU etc.

I've got a 1995 beige PowerMac. 
It came with a 133MHz processor and, iirc, 64MB RAM.
Intel boxes of that year ranged from 66MHz 486s to 100MHz Pentiums,
usually shipping with 16MB RAM. However what's interesting is what's
happened to the boxes since. A few 486s still run as routers, but
most are dead and gone.

The PowerMac has had its processor upgraded - it sits in a
daughter card that slots into the motherboard, and upgrades
up to 1GHz G4 are available. It has 12 Dimm slots - each of which
will accept 128MB RAM, giving a possibility of 1.5GiB RAM, as
much as my fairly new ThinkPad.

It takes a PCI graphics card, so if I had a real need for 3D,
then I could drop in a Mac ATI card. PCI also means SATA, Firewire,
and USB2 is available. It already has SCSI.

iow a 13 year old computer is fast enough to run all
of today's productivity apps :-)

Of course many recent Apples aren't so upgradeable, but I
droppped a 120GB drive into my G4 iBook, and more memory,
which is as much as you need to do with a laptop. It ran
Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo as well as any other machine
that I've had - including Xinerama across internal and
external screen.

btw while Apple was on PPC, you could buy most of their 
products, including iPods, pre-installed with GNU from
Terrasoft - and the same now for the PS3.

[disclaimer, I'm not keen on Apple the company, but will
 give credit to good products]

Cheers,

 - Richard