I'm trying looking for a decent mac (with a display) for less than $100 (including shipping), but ebay isn't giving me much luck. It has to be able to compete with my P4 tower and my Acer Aspire 5532 (with an OC CPU and 4GB RAM).
Apple makes nice machines, but they aren't cheap. Anything less than 100$ will be a G3/G4, and while the Pentium 4 (especially pre-Prescott) is anemic, it will crush the G4, and your P4 will run the latest OSes with patches. That's IF you can find such a thing.
Yep, during my hiatus from here I went to the dark side of computers and I bought a few macs a few of years ago and modded them. Even joined a modding community called MacMod that sold out to MacTech. Thanks to the Hackintosh it died out. Cheapest one I bought was a iMac G3 trayload style for $60. The monitor died a month later and I converted it to a headless mac. I was able to score a G4 sawtooth for about 150 but that was just the tower and had no video card, memory and hard drive. It's just easier to run a hackintosh these days. As long as the CPU supports SSE3 you can run I think up to OS x 10.6. I've been out of the Hackintosh world a bit so I don't know what you would need to run say Mavericks or Yosemite.
Down my side of the world, usually iMacs can be easily found for under $100. Otherwise if a monitor wasn't considered, I'm seeing dual G5 1.8-2Ghz towers with up to 6GB RAM for around $100 on eBay.
Maybe on eBay if you can find someone in your area who has anything Apple related for sale that's old to shoot them a message if they have something you're after. It might not be on eBay but they still might keep a stash in their shed they might consider selling. It's how I managed to find an AT case for my 486 project, from a guy just selling motherboards.
Stuff from the pre-68040 era regularly fetches decent coin, PowerPC isn't cheap nor expensive, G3 to G5 appears to be the sweet spot in value and performance, then prices climb up again as soon as an Intel chip is in it.
Totally aware of that which is where the disparity in pricing comes in., though my impression from dosbox given the price point and of something similar to a P4 in performance wasn't really to be used as a main PC. Maybe just to run early OS X and MacOS 9 apps and games on the same machine. Best solution for dosbox is really to save some more cash if he wants an Intel Mac.
I was looking for an intel mac (that was more powerful than my P4) to use a main pc under $100 dollars because I wanted something cheap as a main pc that was at a price I could save up for on my very small allowance.
Totally aware of that which is where the disparity in pricing comes in., though my impression from dosbox given the price point and of something similar to a P4 in performance wasn't really to be used as a main PC. Maybe just to run early OS X and MacOS 9 apps and games on the same machine. Best solution for dosbox is really to save some more cash if he wants an Intel Mac.
P4 is anemic, but it was better than Apple's offerings at the time. Apple really bungled G5 with their meddling of IBM''s design. Mobile P4s, the worst of the bunch, could beat the later PBG4 machines.
But yeah, I don't know what you were expecting price wise. If you want a quality machine that's cheap, you want a ThinkPad.
I'm probably at this point going to just stick with finishing the computer I started building. I still have to get ram, a power supply and a low-end graphics card.
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Maybe on eBay if you can find someone in your area who has anything Apple related for sale that's old to shoot them a message if they have something you're after. It might not be on eBay but they still might keep a stash in their shed they might consider selling. It's how I managed to find an AT case for my 486 project, from a guy just selling motherboards.
Stuff from the pre-68040 era regularly fetches decent coin, PowerPC isn't cheap nor expensive, G3 to G5 appears to be the sweet spot in value and performance, then prices climb up again as soon as an Intel chip is in it.
P4 is anemic, but it was better than Apple's offerings at the time. Apple really bungled G5 with their meddling of IBM''s design. Mobile P4s, the worst of the bunch, could beat the later PBG4 machines.
But yeah, I don't know what you were expecting price wise. If you want a quality machine that's cheap, you want a ThinkPad.