I remember my first Mac, the Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, equipped with PowerPC G4 processor running at 867 Mhz (yes, that’s right… Mega- not Giga- hertz), 512 MB of RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce 2 graphics card.
With side door access, this model was easy to upgrade. It was a tool-less design that came out before PC designers thought of putting in their gaming case designs. After putting mine through a few years of traveling and abuse, I decided it was a tank of a workstation as it had no cracked plastic or broken doors!
This machine had one of the most elegant operating systems at the time, OS X. Now keep this in mind: it was released in 2001 and at that time Windows was Windows 2000 and XP came out later that year. Consumer friendly Linux was still in its infancy. So OS X was the only consumer level Unix system. It was extremely easy to use and finely tuned to the machine’s hardware. I must say for being such a power horse at the time, the Power Mac G4 ran quietly.
The only drawback for me was portability. I had to carry this computer around a lot, and it was not light, but designers at Apple were insightful enough to put handles on the case, which made carrying the beefy machine around easier.
This was a solid machine and never gave me any issue, I eventually sold it to buy computer parts for another project, but looking back I wish I kept it for nostalgic reasons.