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Shell-swapped iMac G3?
Posted by: oneboyarmy on 2015-07-12 18:32:32 I was the only bidder on a recent eBay auction for a Flower Power iMac G3. I got a push notification that the auction was ending in 15 minutes and still had no bids. The listing didn't go into a ton of detail about the specs on the machine, but it looked great in the photos and the seller has great feedback. I didn't think I'd win, but here we are! It arrived Saturday morning and by evening I got it unboxed, powered up and decided to see what my lucky bid got me. To start, it felt like opening a time capsule. It looks like it was powered off for the last 10 years, with the last few documents being modified in January of 2005. I opened System Profiler and started looking around... and it's running OS 9.0.4, has 128MB of RAM and 8MB Rage Pro video, a DVD-ROM drive and a 30GB hard drive. Definitely wasn't right on the specs for a Flower Power. Booting into Open Firmware advised me it was a PowerMac2,2. A quick peek in MacTracker and a Google search later confirmed my suspicion, this was not exactly the iMac I was looking for. Bummer. Is the slightly lesser CPU (750 versus 750cx) and lesser graphics really going to ruin my whole world? Probably not. I'm still very happy with it now that my mystery is over! The firmware is still on a 3.x version and will need to be updated along with setting up a clean OS. I threw in the soundtrack CD from The Fellowship of the Ring to test the optical drive and was really impressed by how good the audio quality is. I'd never used a G3 series iMac for more than a few minutes back when they were new so I had no idea what to expect.
Posted by: TheWhiteFalcon on 2015-07-12 19:01:45 Yeah, the speakers are very impressive. Same with the Pro speakers of that era.
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2015-07-12 19:46:08 I'm impressed tha you have gotten hold of an iMac without disintegrated factory speakers tbh... that is worth it's weight in gold right there. 🙂 If you can find a junk 600MHz Snow or Graphite machine this will have the 750cx and the 16Mb graphics set also... still not quite the 700Mhz of the flower power but most of the way there, and at a guess probably easier to find than the last 700MHz iMac G3's. I had a couple spare but I only know where one currently is (as it is a meter away lol). If I can find the others I had I will offer it to you for your endeavours for not a whole lot of coin. 🙂 Anyway, enjoy it regardless! 😀
Posted by: oneboyarmy on 2015-07-13 04:56:44 Yeah, the speakers are very impressive. Same with the Pro speakers of that era. I love the Pro speakers. I remember my friends getting an iMac G4 in college and how amazed I was by the sound quality. I still kick myself for not buying one of the Griffin iFire adapters so I could use a set with my iBook.
Posted by: oneboyarmy on 2015-07-13 05:01:19 I'm impressed tha you have gotten hold of an iMac without disintegrated factory speakers tbh... that is worth it's weight in gold right there. 🙂 If you can find a junk 600MHz Snow or Graphite machine this will have the 750cx and the 16Mb graphics set also... still not quite the 700Mhz of the flower power but most of the way there, and at a guess probably easier to find than the last 700MHz iMac G3's. I had a couple spare but I only know where one currently is (as it is a meter away lol). If I can find the others I had I will offer it to you for your endeavours for not a whole lot of coin. 🙂 Anyway, enjoy it regardless! 😀 I've heard the stories about them but totally forgot! I'm definitely feeling more and more pleased about this purchase. I was extremely glad to get a case that was intact and not cracked or falling apart in some way. I peeked around for a 600MHz logic board but I'm not going to go too crazy just yet. I would certainly be interested in bumping it up if the right parts came around. I have a white 600MHz iBook (8MB graphics there as well) so it would be nice to have the iMac surpass that.
Posted by: MrMacintosh on 2015-07-29 09:47:57 If I recall correctly, those iMac logic boards were re-designed slightly at a certain point. The CPU is in a different location, and the heatsink built into the machine won't match up properly. I believe it was switching from Motorola to IBM CPUs or something similar. I could be a little bit off here, so feel free to correct me.
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2015-08-05 07:37:28 If I recall correctly, those iMac logic boards were re-designed slightly at a certain point. The CPU is in a different location, and the heatsink built into the machine won't match up properly. I believe it was switching from Motorola to IBM CPUs or something similar. I could be a little bit off here, so feel free to correct me. I beleive it was at the 500MHz point from what I recall of various machines I have had apart that the CPU position changed so 350/400/450 chassis and 500/600/700 chassis differ.
Posted by: XBHS1997 on 2015-08-09 12:27:56 Good purchase! I'll open my Flower Power and replace the inner plastic "frame" (around the CRT) as it is broken, I also got it for a reasonable price. The case is not perfect though, but acceptable.
Posted by: Byrd on 2015-08-10 00:11:30 I can confirm the older iMac motherboards do not line up with the shielding and heatsink placement on the last 750cx G3 iMacs - suggesting your FP iMac is indeed a shell swap, but not the internal parts/skeleton.
Posted by: CC_333 on 2015-08-10 12:00:25 So, does this mean that if I wanted to, say, upgrade my Tangerine Slot Loader from its stock 400 MHz board to a late model 700 MHz one, I'd have to swap some kind of internal parts as well? How easy is this? Would I have to replace all the innards of the machine (save for maybe the CRT) additionally to the logic board? c
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-08-21 12:55:26 So, does this mean that if I wanted to, say, upgrade my Tangerine Slot Loader from its stock 400 MHz board to a late model 700 MHz one, I'd have to swap some kind of internal parts as well? How easy is this? Would I have to replace all the innards of the machine (save for maybe the CRT) additionally to the logic board? c Not wanting to be accused of too much necromancy, but i feel i should answer this question for the benefit of anyone reading this thread years down the track. Basically, if you want to upgrade an original fruity iMac to a second series board (500/600/700), then honestly the easiest way to do it would probably be a shell swap assuming you have a fully working 700 to utilise for the purpose. The heat sink is actuall part of the metal chassis on the iMac slotloaders, so in essence, the logic board has to follow the metal chassis it came with. This means that in essense, you are actually going to end up stripping down two machines almost entirely to bones to then rebuild them with all the parts from the one you want to in this case upgrade. Now, its also been a long while since i was this deep inside a slotload iMac... at least a decade, but whilst i beleive things like CRT's and HV board are interchangable, i cannot say that with 100% certainty. Now, as ive outlined in the past, there are distinct diffrrences in the composition of the plastic between some machines, in particular with regard to the grey inner bezels. On later machines, theyre basically like the old SpindlerPlastic™️ and will likely start to splinter and crack the moment you take the outer clear plastics off, and its highly likely that any affectwd machine by now probably already has started falling apart inside just from being moved anyway. Earlier machines.... basically the first generation 350 400 and 450 models seem not to suffer this issue in my experience. The internal plastic looks and feels entirely different. Therefore if i were to perform an upgrade i would do it as follows. I would pull down both machines to the metal chassis level, and leave all the functional parts of the faster machine intact, with the possible exception of the optical drive. Whether there is a case for swapping the optical drive entirely depends on what each machine was configured with, as some of the cheaper 500mhz Indigo machines only shipped with a CD-ROM drive. Work out what machine has what and use the drive that suits your purposes. Obviously, the same discretion probably applies with hard disks. But in any case, leave the HV board, logic board and CRT in place in the chassis as there really isnt any need to swap them if it all works. The speakers are likely rotted in either machine, but if you can salvage a good pair from the two, do so. Once you have your complete functional assortment of working parts in the chassis, just do a shell swap and use the early plastics if theyre in good condition which they should be.
Posted by: Snial on 2026-08-21 14:44:37 I was the only bidder on a recent eBay auction for a Flower Power iMac G3. I <snip> running OS 9.0.4, has 128MB of RAM and 8MB Rage Pro video, a DVD-ROM drive and a 30GB <snip> Open Firmware <snip> PowerMac2,2. <snip> lesser CPU (750 versus 750cx) <snip> I persuaded my girlfriend at the time to get a Flower Power iMac (CD-RW) to replace her Acorn RISC-PC (25MHz ARM6). Honestly, it looked amazing (the iMac that is, though I like the RISC-PC design). I’m not sure how much RAM we got for it. Maybe 128MB, 192MB or 320MB. I think I was trying to look ahead a bit. I already had a Tangerine iBook/300 with 96MB originally though I might have already upped it to 288MB, but I think I thought her needs were less than mine, so it could have been 192MB. This was the period when we had Ethernet cables snaking around the house (she was on the 2rd floor (3rd floor in the U.S.) of a Victorian terrace house), so we didn’t get Airport (my iBook had it installed). The first domestic WiFi I had was in summer 2002, in the flat I’d recently moved into with a mate of mine. But Flower Power - loved it (says the bloke born in that era ;-) ).
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-08-21 15:24:40 I persuaded my girlfriend at the time to get a Flower Power iMac (CD-RW) to replace her Acorn RISC-PC (25MHz ARM6). Honestly, it looked amazing (the iMac that is, though I like the RISC-PC design). I’m not sure how much RAM we got for it. Maybe 128MB, 192MB or 320MB. I think I was trying to look ahead a bit. I already had a Tangerine iBook/300 with 96MB originally though I might have already upped it to 288MB, but I think I thought her needs were less than mine, so it could have been 192MB. This was the period when we had Ethernet cables snaking around the house (she was on the 2rd floor (3rd floor in the U.S.) of a Victorian terrace house), so we didn’t get Airport (my iBook had it installed). The first domestic WiFi I had was in summer 2002, in the flat I’d recently moved into with a mate of mine. But Flower Power - loved it (says the bloke born in that era ;-) ). I was always envious of anyone lucky enough to own a Blue Dalmation one. Couldnt really convince my parents to get me one unfortunately. 😩🤣
Posted by: Snial on 2026-08-21 16:40:48 I was always envious of anyone lucky enough to own a Blue Dalmation one. Couldnt really convince my parents to get me one unfortunately. 😩🤣 Both were nice, Blue Dalmation had a sort-of optical illusion effect about it! What computer did you have instead? I think she certainly bought the FP iMac before the start of the new year in September 2001, since she was a primary school teacher. And part of the reason was that they were finally phasing out the Acorn ARM computers and switching to PCs (which is how I got my A3020). So, my argument was that she could do anything she needed a PC for with a Mac. So she bought MS Office for Mac along with it. At the time it was still a Classic Mac OS world, though everyone knew Mac OS X was coming. But the first semi-usable version, Mac OS X 10.1 was still a month in the future, so she had Mac OS 9 (and of course, MS Office was Mac OS 9 too). I was also Mac OS 9.1 until I replaced my Tangerine iBook with an iceBook G3 in spring 2002. I think it's valuable to try and put oneself back in the situation at the time, because most of the same iMacs today will have been upgraded, at least with the HD and RAM, and possibly the CPU. So, we could do more with those machines now than then, but at the same time those machines in our world are extremely limited. e.g. my B&W G3/350 would have been a pretty capable do anything machine at the time (it had FireWire), but despite this one having far more RAM, HD and a much better (later) Mac OS (10.3.8) it's also a challenging machine to work with due to the gap in computing environments between then and now. But going back to Flower Power. I think that @oneboyarmy has done pretty well, hitting Silver (if not gold) with the buy. The FP iMac was at the pinnacle of Apple's jazzy iMac G3 designs. After these Macs, they became less adventurous, because they needed people to start buying the iMac G4, which was only 6 months in the future. I mean, Ruby, Snow iMac G3s were technically better, but certainly not as wild.
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-09-07 22:40:39 Both were nice, Blue Dalmation had a sort-of optical illusion effect about it! What computer did you have instead? I think she certainly bought the FP iMac before the start of the new year in September 2001, since she was a primary school teacher. And part of the reason was that they were finally phasing out the Acorn ARM computers and switching to PCs (which is how I got my A3020). So, my argument was that she could do anything she needed a PC for with a Mac. So she bought MS Office for Mac along with it. At the time it was still a Classic Mac OS world, though everyone knew Mac OS X was coming. But the first semi-usable version, Mac OS X 10.1 was still a month in the future, so she had Mac OS 9 (and of course, MS Office was Mac OS 9 too). I was also Mac OS 9.1 until I replaced my Tangerine iBook with an iceBook G3 in spring 2002. I think it's valuable to try and put oneself back in the situation at the time, because most of the same iMacs today will have been upgraded, at least with the HD and RAM, and possibly the CPU. So, we could do more with those machines now than then, but at the same time those machines in our world are extremely limited. e.g. my B&W G3/350 would have been a pretty capable do anything machine at the time (it had FireWire), but despite this one having far more RAM, HD and a much better (later) Mac OS (10.3.8) it's also a challenging machine to work with due to the gap in computing environments between then and now. But going back to Flower Power. I think that @oneboyarmy has done pretty well, hitting Silver (if not gold) with the buy. The FP iMac was at the pinnacle of Apple's jazzy iMac G3 designs. After these Macs, they became less adventurous, because they needed people to start buying the iMac G4, which was only 6 months in the future. I mean, Ruby, Snow iMac G3s were technically better, but certainly not as wild. I had a lime Rev. C for a while, but ended up getting a secondhand G3 B+W as the iMac was a bit pokey and not as upgradable as I would have liked, and I really needed firewire when I got into editing video and downloading masses of photos for editing etc, as USB was just not in any way sufficient. I later upgraded to a Lombard from my PB1400 lso, and then a Pismo when one became available cheap needing repairs that i was more than capable of. The G3 was honestly a great machine, arguably better in most respects other than raw CPU speed than any model of iMac wouldve been, and I ended up upgrading it significantly and got many years of good reliable use out of it and own it still in its final form, still running well, to this day. I eventually went and got a G4 and then a G5 when my budget allowed later in life, and the G5 was my daily until about 2019, and also still works to this day... the G5 was one of the last PCIe dual-core air-cooled models, so had none of the issues endemic to the hot-running, power-hungry, flakey PCI-X models, and it has honestly been up there as one of my favourite Macs of all time, along with the G3 and Pismo. 🙂 But yes, for what it is worth I didnt really adopt OSX with open arms until 10.3, as it was the first version that ran as fast if not slightly faster than OS9 did... I found 10.1 to be barely usable on slower G3-based equipment, and whilst 10.2 was better, i still found it a bit gluggy for my liking and i wasnt entirely happy with the UI yet. this being said, when I did finally adopt OSX, i never really looked back to OS9 for anything in my normal workflow. I committed fully from that point, but i avoided 10.4 as i found to be very bloated, a sign of things to come. 10.5 runs well on my G5, however frankly, with that sort of relativehorsepower there isnt any excuse for it not to. But yes, with regard to using these machines in the context that thy originally existed, I guess you could say i got fairly ahead of the curve there as soon as I had the money too, upgrading them with intent to get them to their peak specs or at least well above factory specification well before it became necessary, and i feel that this is what gave my G3, Pismo and G5 such long legs... the G3 for example already had 1Gb of RAM, a pair of 40Gb 7200rPM hard drives and a DVD burner by at least 2004, and the Pismo was sitting with a 40Gb hard disc and a comfortable 768Gb of RAM, and the G5 currently sits with a 250Gb and 160Gb HDD and 8Gb of RAM. As built though, those machines were rather meagre in their fitout in a lot of cases... for example the Pismo came with 64Gb of RAM and a 6Gb HDD when it was new, and even a late slotload iMac was nowhere near close to its potential out of the box in 2002. As you said, Apple made quite a few machines back then that really could do almost anything you asked of them, or could be easily made to, and did for a long time. Unfortunately though, the world wide web, the move to cloud-based solutions and the massive changes in security protocols that accompanied the rapidly developing 2010's computing ecosystem, as well as somewhat aggressive efforts to get people off old hardware and software and onto new (and expensive) stuff, using forced obsolescence as a business model, seems to be what ultimately made these machines difficult, if not entirely unviable to use comfortably in a modern context. For what it is worth, these older machines and the software they run will still run exactly as good as they did in the various specialised tasks we put them too in the day, such as video editting, graphic design and rendering etc. ironically, it is the bread and butter, mundane stuff like changes in how office software works (again, with a massive paradigm shift towards having cloud-based digital work environments, and checking emails and browsing the web that has ultimately put them to pasture.
Posted by: Snial on 2026-09-08 04:00:21 <snip> secondhand G3 B+W as the iMac was a bit pokey <snip> needed firewire when I got into editing video <snip> upgraded to a Lombard <snip> Pismo <snp> The G3 was honestly a great machine <snip> got a G4 and then a G5 <snip> was my daily until about 2019 <snip> one of my favourite Macs of all time <snip> 🙂 Impressive story. Circa 2002, the BBC used Lombards/Pismos to edit broadcast video in situ for outdoor shoots. <snip>I didnt really adopt OSX <snip> until 10.3 <snip>10.1 to be barely usable <snip>10.2 was better, i still found it a bit gluggy <snip> finally adopt OSX, i never really looked <snip> avoided 10.4 <snip> bloated <snip> 10.5 runs well on my G5, <snip> upgrading them with intent to get them to their peak specs <snip G3/G5 high specs> 10.2 won me over, because Jaguar (Jagwire) looked furry 😉 . <snip> Unfortunately <snp> forced obsolescence <snip> older machines and the software they run will still run exactly as good as they did in the various specialised tasks we put them to <snip> it is the bread and butter, mundane stuff <snip> ultimately put them to pasture. Indeed, much of which is all the effort needed for security - the arms race between hackers and users.
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