iMac G5

The iMac G5 and PowerPC era felt like the future arriving quietly on your desk. With its slim white body, soft glow of the display, and the reassuring speed of a PowerPC processor inside, the iMac G5 made computing feel calm, creative, and exciting all at once. This was a time of iTunes playlists, iPhoto libraries, and late-night tinkering, when OS X felt smooth and modern in a way nothing else did. PowerPC wasn’t just a chip, it was part of an era when computers had personality, and using a Mac felt less like work and more like discovery.

For Christmas, I ended up getting myself a 2004 Apple iMac G5, one of those old-school machines with a PowerPC G5 inside, mostly just to tinker with and relive the vibe. And honestly, it’s been such a throwback. The moment you turn it on, it feels like stepping straight back into the early 2000s, the clean design, the all-in-one simplicity, that quiet confidence Macs used to have. It reminds me of a time when computers felt exciting and a little magical, when you’d load up iTunes, organize photos in iPhoto, and just spend hours poking around for fun. Using it now doesn’t feel practical at all, it just feels good, like reconnecting with a piece of tech that actually had a soul.

The iMac G5 was such a cool piece of hardware for its time. Everything was tucked neatly behind the display, which felt almost unreal back then: no bulky tower, no mess of cables, just this slim-ish white slab sitting on your desk. Inside, it ran on a PowerPC G5 processor, which was genuinely powerful for the era and helped make OS X feel smooth and responsive. You had things like USB 2.0, FireWire, built-in Ethernet, and optional AirPort and Bluetooth, so it felt surprisingly modern even as the internet and wireless tech were really taking off.

What really made it special, though, was how complete it felt out of the box. The screen was bright and sharp, the speakers were decent, and everything from iLife apps to everyday tasks just worked without fuss. You could plug in an iPod, burn a CD, edit photos, or mess around with GarageBand and feel like your computer was actually built for creative stuff. Looking back, the iMac G5 wasn’t just about specs, it was about that feeling of having a powerful, friendly, all-in-one machine that made sitting down at your desk something to look forward to.

The iMac arrived with what appeared to be its original hard drive, a Western Digital 160 GB SATA disk with 8MB cache, wiped clean. Given that the drive dates from 2010, it was almost certainly a replacement rather than the factory original. I removed it and installed a 2.5-inch Seagate ST1000LM007 1 TB drive with 128MB cache, both to gain capacity and improve overall performance.

The iMac came with an Apple Keyboard A1048 and a wireless Mighty Mouse A1197, both in remarkably good condition, free of the yellowing that so often marks keyboards (and mice) from that era.

Aside from the hard drive having been replaced, the iMac arrived complete, every option Apple once offered already in place: Bluetooth, AirPort Extreme, and RAM filled to its limit. I opened it only once, carefully, brushing away years of dust, cleaning the fans, and renewing the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU, a small act of maintenance meant less to upgrade than to let the machine keep going a while longer.

So what do I plan to do with the iMac G5? On the surface, it’s the obvious stuff like playing old games, revisiting software from another era, and enjoying the kind of experiences this machine was originally built for. But the longer I spend with it, the more I want it to become something a bit more deliberate. An offline computer I can rely on for programming, browsing old encyclopedias, writing, drawing, and just quietly exploring ideas without constant notifications or distractions pulling me away.

There’s something refreshing about using a machine that doesn’t demand updates, logins, or an internet connection to feel complete. The iMac G5 feels like a reminder of a slower, more thoughtful style of computing, where everything you needed lived on the machine itself. Turning it into a self-contained creative space feels less like a project and more like a small act of preservation, holding onto a way of working that values focus, curiosity, and the simple joy of sitting down at a computer just to see where it takes you.

• tagged with #hardware
• 822 words
• published on Jan 7, 2026