I Perfected the iMac G4

This is a 20-inch iMac G4 from 2002 and, in my opinion, it is the most beautiful thing Apple has ever produced. The only problem is that it is totally dead, but today, thanks to the power of Australia and Apple Silicon, we will resurrect it and give it a lot more power, so stay tuned and if you like go to Great Longitudes to save the obsolete computers you love. I hope you consider subscribing to the channel. The construction we are doing today is something I have dreamed of. years, but it's always been a little outside my technical comfort level because we're swapping out the guts of this beautiful but very dead iMac G4 and instead powering it with a modern M2 Mac Mini that actually now has a pretty small logic board .

Of course, the defining feature of this iMac G4 display is the beautiful screen that floats on a perfectly balanced stainless steel adjustable arm and there have been a few people who have hacked this display to work over DVI, but that involves rewiring serious one I've never worked on. I had the courage to try it, but some very smart people from Sydney, Australia called Juice Crumb have built something amazing: it's a new board that replaces the original IMAX 20-inch logic board that connects the beautiful 20-inch screen to an input HDMI and that also means that unlike other tricks, this is completely reversible if you want to get your iMac G4 back, just pop out this juicy crumb board and put your original logic board back in.

Now the idea behind the juicy crumb is that you turn your beloved but unused iMac G4 into something usable, a beautiful display without destroying it and we'll have fun playing with it that way, but when Juicy Crumb first approached me and asked me if I would like to play with a special pre. -production board the first thing that came to mind was to build an iMac G4 M2 that I could use, but before I get too deep into testing my poor dead iMac, let's take a closer look at this board right after a few quick words about today's model. sponsor PCB way not only offers high quality PCB production and prototyping but also offers on-site PCB assembly and you can source some of the components with their TurnKey service, they also offer things like injection molding CNC machining high-quality 3D printing, including Sheet Metal Fabrication Do you need HD VI PCB?

The PCB shape offers an overly high density of up to 60 layers with a wide range of customizable options. Be sure to check out the Advanced PCB section to see all the different options for material thickness layers and of course, the most important thing is the color of the solder mask, so if you have any PCB or prototyping needs, I hope you give PCB way.com a chance so I know I said this was a pre-production board but the only pre-production thing it has is actually the firmware, the hardware itself is finalized and this is the version of production.

The only thing that may differ from the one that finally goes on sale is this nice limited edition badge, but looking at the board here are some interesting things, the heart of this is Right here, a Raspberry Pi 2040 microcontroller and then on the board, we have a USB hub, this is a USBC port. Port, three USB Type A ports, your HDMI, of course, these are physical brightness controls. We can actually plug the original Pro speakers from the iMac into this port which is amazing and then we have audio in and out and the power button also on the board we have the connectors for power we have headers for IDE.

I'm actually not quite sure why they are there, possibly just to help. With the board alignment, I don't think they're actually connected and here we have two USB connectors that we could use if we wanted to use it to plug in a new optical drive or something or put USB ports on the front of the iMac. and then on the back, here we have the 20-inch limited edition number 10 of 10. I'm very honored to get one of the first 10 and to reiterate, this board is specific to the 20-inch iMac G4 and is a a bit strange model. there weren't many sold compared to the 15 and 17 inch versions, let's open this up and I'm just going to completely remove the optical drive.

I think in the future we could put a USB drive here, but for now I want as much space as possible for the Mac Mini, so up here is the power supply core, which I hope still works, if not we'll have than take it out and fix it or find a replacement, yeah, I guess Well, let's just do a quick test with the juicy crumb board. Now installing the board should be quite simple. The Juicy Crumb includes a very nice manual, but really all we're doing is taking out this original G4 board and dropping the Juicy Crumb. crumb in place and it's reusing the power connector here, okay, these plastic covers need to be removed and this appears like this, look at that, it's like a perfect fit, okay, let's reconnect these three connectors, there's the display power .

So here it's full of new ports and it looks great and we used the original power cable, we'll connect HDMI and I have some super short cables for audio and USBC. Alright, we'll press the power button on the screen. we have a power light so the power supply works oh look there's my Mac Mini on this iMac G4 oh my goodness it's glorious and as is tradition we're going to test the speakers with my early 2000s emo band well, They work fine, let's see what else can we connect to this thing? Remember these Intel computing devices, let's make the worst iMac ever.

Oh yeah, that's Terri. Okay, how about a totally normal gaming session? The folks at Crumb actually sent me the finalized firmware for this board, which is great because it has some really useful features and since it's based on the Raspberry Pi microcontroller, it's actually very easy to flash and we can just drag and drop the firmware on the plate. It was ejected, so it flashed and now we can use a very special application that we will see after transplanting the Mac Mini. Okay, let's open up this Mac Mini and yeah, just look at how small that logic board is there, it's not.

Even half the space in this case is fine, so check this out: the Mac Mini's logic board and fan assembly fit almost eerily well into the space left by the optical drive up to the point where one of the screw holes The optical drive aligns with the Mac Mini and the back of the fan aligns with the optical drive opening. Did Apple do this on purpose? Well, let me give you a little tour of our construction that is definitely not strange at all. I have the power supply hidden under the iMac fan. G4 and I have the motherboard fan assembly here, it fits surprisingly well, even screwed in where the original optical drive was screwed to the chassis. here I have the Wi-Fi antenna mounted here next to the optical drive door, so I should have good reception and I have access to the front panel here, which, yes, I'm going to run some cables through the back here so it's not fully buttoned but still reversible and from the front it will at least look and feel like an iMac G4 M2 and I connected a separate power button for the Mac Mini so we have to power it separately from the screen, but this should work fine and I think this power button looks pretty cool even if my soldering was a little nuts oh man and here it is in all its glory, our M2 powered iMac G4 and it's as wonderful as I could have dreamed and I mean, it feels like you're using an iMac G4 but it's running all the features.

Modern software is a bit surreal and anachronistic and still futuristic at the same time. I mean, Apple could release this machine today and people would love it. I mean, this looks better than the current IMAX by far. I mean, it's wonderful floating screen on this. I put together the bright and vibrant screen and it's not even IPS, it's just the best of the best from 2002. I'm very happy with this, but there's one more thing we need to do, so let's get a little closer to the updated firmware we installed. The board allows us to use this juicy applet that allows an even better integration of this screen in Mac OS, that is, it allows us to adjust the brightness of the screen from the applet that we will have to choose to allow the application to run even if it is a unidentified developer. and check out that Colin Mister software that you'll recognize as a long-time friend of the channel.

We'll have to restart the computer here, oh man, this is incredibly cool and now we have this juicy crumbs app here and we can adjust the screen brightness from this app and get other device settings, check for firmware updates and very cool things, very useful and this is my new favorite computer oh yeah playing on the iMac G4 this is amazing oh man I can't even begin to describe it. How cool does it feel to just use this machine, this beautiful iMac like it's a new computer, because now it is and I can't believe this screen is decades old and it still looks so good and so smooth, this is incredibly amazing.

I want to use this computer all the time, seriously, I forgot my MacBook Pro. I want to use the iMac G4 M2. Okay, that will do it for today's build and I am so looking forward to this machine that is everything I dreamed it could be and more. now there are some quirks of course like two power buttons and that's because the screen can't actually tell if the computer is idle or not and it's not really that important, it might actually be a benefit like saying that I wanted to keep this thing running as a server or something and I wanted to just turn off the screen separately.

I can do it and there are still two power cables coming out, but I think it's a pretty easy thing to rectify. I can just touch the back. from the power connector and run some power to the Mac Mini and that way we'll just have the single original power cable from the iMac other than that this is a seamless experience. I'm so grateful to Juicy Crumb for sending me one of the first. 10 units and they are doing a run of these to put them up for sale, although I'm not sure how limited the run will be because, as I mentioned, this 20-inch iMac G4 was a pretty rare model and I don't think so.

There are a lot of them out there, but if you're interested I'll of course put a link in the description below in any case. If you enjoyed this video, I would appreciate a thumbs up and if you want to see more. Shenanigans like this, subscribe below and thanks so much for watching and a special thanks to Graham Drew Hamlin James lry George rosanski Jesse Iselle Matthew crell April white James Fryman Andrew Nicholson Scott Cedar bomb rubo Jedi Lyall truid Unknown soldier 41 Tom Woodin Alex Hoffman Veronica explains that Paul Spencer controls Reese Ryan Chris bigs Jason pz Scott Thompson camel rowski Chris Nelson Greg from rut K mods Chris Calderon and Caspar heler who are my highest level patrons and all my patreon supporters for helping make these videos possible .