Just picked up a G3 iMac for a tenner - good deal?

Hi guys. We went to a car boot sale today, and lo an behold, and somewhat bizarrely! someone was selling a nice little Graphite G3 iMac, with a 400Mhz processor and 40 gig HD, for the princely sum of £11.
I knocked her down to £10 and bought it for my 10 year old daughter to get more acquainted with Macs (without knicking my Powerbook!)
It has Tiger 10.4.11 running (and a load of software on it, no doubt of a dubious nature - CS2 for example), but it's in great condition and it all checked out under FSCK.
Do you reckon it's a good deal then? I'm pretty stoked to be honest, I reckon it's worth more, even now.

That's about what it's worth, I bought one three years ago for $20.

By the way, what the heck is a car boot sale? Haha

Was that G3 anywhere near Tring, and was the girl who sold it a blond called Natalie?

ADKhikerVW said:

By the way, what the heck is a car boot sale? Haha

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Basically a yard sale, out of your car. Generally in a large open parking lot with a few others...




Anyways, for 10 pound can hardly be considered a bad deal!

Kevriano said:

Hi guys. We went to a car boot sale today, and lo an behold, and somewhat bizarrely! someone was selling a nice little Graphite G3 iMac, with a 400Mhz processor and 40 gig HD, for the princely sum of £11.
I knocked her down to £10...

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Congrats on your G3 iMac purchase!! Although I'm not going to say getting the lady to come down one whole £ pound is very much!;D ;D

In case you didn't know...if you want to setup your G3 iMac for wireless networking...that you're of course going to need an Airport card...but a lesser known detail is you need to purchase an Airport card adapter that looks like this:



By the way...now that you have gotten it home, and have had a chance to plug it...does it work ok?

Enjoy that new Mac,

- Nick

louishen said:

Was that G3 anywhere near Tring, and was the girl who sold it a blond called Natalie?

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No it wasn't, but yes her name was Natalie according to the username on the iMac!

pigoo3 said:

Congrats on your G3 iMac purchase!! Although I'm not going to say getting the lady to come down one whole £ pound is very much!;D ;D

In case you didn't know...if you want to setup your G3 iMac for wireless networking...that you're of course going to need an Airport card...but a lesser known detail is you need to purchase an Airport card adapter that looks like this:

By the way...now that you have gotten it home, and have had a chance to plug it...does it work ok?

Enjoy that new Mac,

- Nick

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Thanks for that. I didn't know about the adaptor, but as it's going in my daughters bedroom, she won't be having net access yet anyway. Can't trust that she won't find "bad" things.
Anyway, it works perfectly, so £10 seems good enough. I looked on eBay and there are similar models selling for £30.

Kevriano said:

Anyway, it works perfectly, so £10 seems good enough. I looked on eBay and there are similar models selling for £30.

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I definitely agree that £10 was a good price...just from a negotiation standpoint you only got the seller down 9.1%.;D ...but the £11 starting price probably didn't leave very much negotiating room.

If you got a keyboard & mouse with it...then that was definitely worth it. A lot of times the really inexpensive G3 iMacs I've seen don't always come with a keyboard & mouse.

Yes...e-Bay prices for G3 iMacs will definitely be higher...then add in shipping (if it's not close enough to pickup in person)! Shipping costs are what really kills the deal for me.

Congrats again,

- Nick

Yep, keyboard and mouse included. The mouse is different to what I'm used to, being a 2 button job with a scroll wheel in the centre. Good though, still lights up and everything, a testimony to Apple's construction, after all, it must be 9 or 10 years old.
The only thing it doesn't have is a disc burning drive, just read only, but that's easily overcome, we have 2 other Mac's after all!

Sounds like a deal to me also....i also just got a tangerine G3 imac at a yard sale last month...15 bucks and works great..immediately yanked out the ancient dell pc we had as a desktop and voila an all mac household...ordered up an older airport extreme base station for cheap from Wegener Media...got it next day and was wireless to the wife's G4 Ibook...Man i am glad to be rid of the pcs in my house..
Byron

For those not in the know, a "boot" is a car trunk. Hence, a boot sale is selling things out of the trunk of a car. In US, we'd say flea market. Elsewhere, "thieves market." At current exchange British 10 pounds come to about $16.50. Hard to lose with any working machine at that price! There are actually refurbishers online selling "new" tangerine (5-flavor) i-Macs for $300. My girls grew up with aging Macs, Performas and finally, a shared Indigo iMac on their desks, before going off to college with shiny iBooks, their first all new computers. Guess what the Harvard student likes to do when she gets home on break? Fire up the old original Mac, the one with the separate toaster-oven size (30 Meg!) hard-disk, and knock off a couple of rounds of "Hangman" for old times sake! Your daughter may not be able to do much in the way of world wide web access with that machine, or appreciate the new Unix-based Mac operating systems, but so what? She'll have a ton of fun with a machine that's bullet-proof by virtue of being disposable! You sound like a great Dad...

Mackers said:

For those not in the know, a "boot" is a car trunk. Hence, a boot sale is selling things out of the trunk of a car. In US, we'd say flea market. Elsewhere, "thieves market." At current exchange British 10 pounds come to about $16.50. Hard to lose with any working machine at that price! There are actually refurbishers online selling "new" tangerine (5-flavor) i-Macs for $300. My girls grew up with aging Macs, Performas and finally, a shared Indigo iMac on their desks, before going off to college with shiny iBooks, their first all new computers. Guess what the Harvard student likes to do when she gets home on break? Fire up the old original Mac, the one with the separate toaster-oven size hard-disk, and knock off a couple of rounds of "Hangman" for old times sake! Your daughter may not be able to do much in the way of world wide web access with that machine, or appreciate the new Unix-based Mac operating systems, but so what? She'll have a ton of fun with a machine that's bullet-proof by virtue of being disposable! You sound like a great Dad...

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Thank you, I try. Welcome to the forum, stick around!

The big query is why louishen asked his question about Natalie?

For our Brit contributors, here's my two bobs' worth.

First, a point of clarification - Kevriano states "graphite" to describe his G3 400 MHz iMac. I wonder if it's the model that I believe Apple called 'charcoal', because the (later) graphite (which is more a vague blue colour) model was 600 MHz. [Source: Mactracker]

That aside, slot-loading iMacs are rock-solid, and for £10 (NZ$30) it's a steal, well done! [I paid NZ$180 (£60) for my G3 600 MHz iMac]. Enjoy your purchase Kevriano, you won't regret it.

PS - as HarryB has asked, just who is/was this mysterious Natalie? The suspense is killing me!

hughvane said:

First, a point of clarification - Kevriano states "graphite" to describe his G3 400 MHz iMac. I wonder if it's the model that I believe Apple called 'charcoal', because the (later) graphite (which is more a vague blue colour) model was 600 MHz. [Source: Mactracker]

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At one time (long before this thread) I also was a little confused by this...but there actually were two "Graphite" G3 iMac models...one was a 400mhz & one was a 600mhz:

400mhz Graphite: Apple iMac G3/400

600mhz Graphite: Apple iMac G3/600

- Nick

And still hughvane and I hang by our suspenders?

Nice, Kev. That's a sweet deal. Anyway, how've you been man? It's been a while since we've chatted. I've actually got a couple of new tunes. I'll PM you a link to download/listen to one of them. I figured out the overblown power metal falsetto scream (a la King Diamond).

Nice. Got the Pm, will pass judgement later.

pigoo3 said:

there actually were two "Graphite" G3 iMac models...one was a 400mhz & one was a 600mhz:
400mhz Graphite: Apple iMac G3/400

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Thanks for this Nick. It's not the first time there's been discrepancy between Mactracker and EveryMac.

I think I can say with confidence that the 400 MHz 'graphite' iMac, aka 'special edition', never made it to NZ. Model changes were rapid at the time, and I think Apple NZ decided to skip some versions that were available in the States.
[Aside] I still can't fathom how the somewhat dirty blue colour of my iMac 600 can be described as 'graphite'.

PS - an APB has now been issued for Natalie, whoever she may be. C'mon Louishen, spill the beans. ;D

hughvane said:

PS - an APB has now been issued for Natalie, whoever she may be. C'mon Louishen, spill the beans. ;D

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Despite both you and harryb2448 being about as far away from London as you could both possibly be, you both seem to be quite interested. Why might that be?

vansmith said:

Despite both you and harryb2448 being about as far away from London as you could both possibly be, you both seem to be quite interested. Why might that be?

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A-ha! Who remembers a computer game called Carmen Sandiego? It's quite possible that Natalie from Tring is in fact a reincarnation of CS.