Molar Mac: Apple’s Ugliest Mac! - Krazy Ken's Tech Talk
- This is the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One, or as I like to... (Ken grunting) I'm sorry. Why do I do this to myself? This is the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One, or as I like to call it, the Molar Mac. Yeah, it kind of looks like a giant tooth. This Mac is sort of an Apple outcast, for lack of a better word, and Apple killed it in only nine months.
And depending on who you ask, it was kind of an ugly computer. No matter what you think of its appearance, there's still lots to explore. And this Mac also means a lot more to me on a deeper personal level too.
So let's dive in. (bright, jazzy, funky music) Hey, everyone, how are you all doing? If you're new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken, and Apple's quest to build all-in-one computers dates back to the original Lisa computer, and more famously, the Macintosh, introduced on January 24th, 1984, in this building behind me, the Flint Center. The computer and monitor were combined into a single unit and Apple continued to make all-in-ones for many years, such as the Macintosh SE, Color Classic, and one of my personal favorites, the Macintosh TV, or as I lovingly call it the Blackintosh.
All Macintoshes at this time were based on the Motorola 68K architecture, but in March 1994, Apple wanted to speed things up with new PowerPC-based Macs. This was an all-new processor created by the AIM Alliance, Apple, IBM, and Motorola. And the first all-in-one PowerPC Mac was the Power Macintosh 5200 LC, released initially only to education markets for 1,699.
After all, getting computers into classrooms is part of Apple's DNA. It has been since practically the beginning. So it's good to see that mission continuing with the PowerPC era. And on April 15th, 1996, Apple pushed the All-in-One Power Macintosh line further with the new 5260 and 5400. But before we talk more about the new products, we should discuss the elephant in the room.
Bankruptcy. (BOOM!) What? Bankruptcy? You're telling me that Apple, this wildly successful company which today is valued at $3.28 trillion, was almost bankrupt? Yeah.
The '90s were a rough time for Apple. In Q2 of '96 alone, Apple lost $740 million, and although they didn't officially declare bankruptcy, they were in trouble. Profits were crashing, product lines were failing, and Windows was dominating Mac OS in the market.
Apple needed rescuing. Steve Jobs, one of the three founders of Apple, left the company in 1985, which is a whirlwind of a story for another time, and Apple needed him to come back. So Apple acquired Steve's company NeXT for $427 million and the deal included NeXT's technology, personnel, and, of course, Steve. In January 1997, Steve was officially back at Apple as a part-time advisor, and then in February, the NeXT deal was officially closed.
It was done. Seven months later in September 1997, Steve Jobs took over as interim CEO of Apple and one of his new strategies was to narrow down the product offerings. - When we got to the company a year ago, there were a lot of products. These were the product platforms, 15 product platforms. If we had four great products, that's all we need. Part of this new strategy was a new generation of PowerPC chip named G3.
And at an Apple event on November 10th, 1997, Steve unveiled two new G3 desktops, the Power Macintosh G3 desktop and the Power Macintosh G3 MiniTower. But wait, where's the G3 All-In-One? This is where the story gets a bit interesting because the All-in-One wasn't released until five months after the G3 desktop and MiniTower. So what was going on during that time? In late '97 and early '98, Apple was hard at work on their first-ever i product, the iMac, and it was unlike any other computer on the market at the time. Apple took big risks by ditching old I/O like SCSI and Apple Desktop Bus in favor of USB.
They also created a radically new egg-shaped case with color, and probably the most controversial move, they ditched the floppy drive. But Apple was betting on the future, and to do that, you sometimes gotta let stuff go. There's more to the iMac story, and if you're interested, check out my iMac episode here. However, while Apple was working on the iMac, they were also working on another product codenamed Artemis, which was also a G3-powered all-in-one computer. It's like they were making two similar products at once. This Artemis computer would soon become the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One.
I'm not sure how much collaboration there was between the iMac and the G3 All-In-One teams, but there are some similarities, so I'm guessing some ideas were shared at least. Other than that speculation, I cannot say much because I can't find any internal tidbits about the Molar Mac. Aside from a black-and-white photo on Getty Images which shows Steve Jobs in the same room as a transparent Molar Mac prototype dated September 18th, 1997. Less than seven months after that photo was shot, on April 4th, 1998, Apple officially released the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One for $1,499, but exclusively to North American education markets. So now we know where you came from, now let's take a look at you in greater detail. (awkward orchestral strings plucking) Yeah, you're definitely tooth shaped.
You can kind of see it from the front, but you can definitely see it from the top. The molar shape is also a bit visible from the back and I suppose the side too. Okay, it's visible from pretty much any way you look at this thing. Wait, if this Mac is a giant tooth, are these holes cavities? Oh, I don't want to think about that. I'm sure a few people thought of the nickname Molar Mac for this computer, but it's likely the term was originally coined by Washington Apple Pi President Lorin Evans and I've been using the nickname ever since I heard it because I like it. Their article called this Mac "beauty challenged," which I agree, it's definitely not the prettiest Mac, especially when you compare it to Apple's industrial design in other products.
But beauty is objective, right? (teeth chattering) Why the (beep) did I- (teeth chattering) Shut up. Tooth comparisons aside, there are some other design traits worth looking at. Most of the case has a beige color, but Apple officially calls it Platinum.
There's lots of curves present in this design, which are likely a result of the espresso design language Apple used in products since 1992. On the top of the front bezel is a tiny rainbow Apple logo, and on each side near the back, there's a gray translucent Apple logo with a matte texture. Oddly enough, the top and back of the G3 All-In-One also have this translucent plastic with matte finish, despite the rest of the case being made of an opaque platinum plastic. My theory is the Molar Mac was kind of an in-between product. Apple was transitioning away from their Espresso design language to the new design language with the iMac and future products, and the Molar Mac was in the middle. The iMac had lots of translucent plastic with a matte finish and maybe there was an internal discussion where folks at Apple said, "Hey, we should try some of that flair on this other all-in-one."
However, at the time of the Molar Mac's announcement, the iMac hasn't been revealed yet. So to the eyes of the public, the Molar Mac was actually the first Mac with translucent plastic and that design trait would go on to live in other Apple products, and it all started with this obscure model. For dimensions, this G3 is 19.92 inches tall, 16.08 inches wide, and 18 inches deep, and it weighs 59.5 pounds. This is the heaviest all-in-one Mac Apple ever made.
The second heaviest was this Mac, but we'll talk about that later. There's still plenty more to explore with the Molar Mac, right after a quick break. I absolutely love SHARGE's transparent tech. I've shown some before, but I have a new one to show you today. This is the ICEMAG 2, which is the world's first wireless magnetic power bank with active cooling, and just like SHARGE's other products, it looks freaking awesome.
The ICEMAG 2 is a 10,000 milliamp hour power bank, which is double the capacity of many other common wireless power banks. ICEMAG 2 uses an active cooling system, which cools down the battery, resulting in faster, longer-lasting charging. And the compact design is also super portable and it fits in your pocket. It charges phones with the Qi2 standard at 15 watts and it is Apple MagSafe compatible. And because it's a SHARGE product, of course it has this beautiful transparent design and some extra RGB lighting to boot.
And check it out. It has a built-in kickstand, so now while you're charging, you can also watch stuff on your phone, and you can use it in landscape or in portrait, no problem. You can also charge two devices at once, one with the wireless connection and one with the wired connection and it's TSA compliant, so you can bring it with you on the plane inside your carry-on baggage. So go ahead and click the links in the description to get your own SHARGE ICEMAG 2 today.
And when you do that, you're also supporting the Computer Clan. So thank you very much. All right, let's continue exploring this tooth-shaped Mac.
To make the Molar Mac, Apple collaborated with teachers and students to make sure they had everything they needed, and that might be why the thing is so big. Yeah, they crammed a lot of stuff into it. On the front is a 15-inch CRT with resolutions up to 1024 by 768. There's also a built-in microphone and two headphone jacks so students could share. There's also stereo speakers.
In the middle is the volume control, and then we get to the, um, squinty face of this computer. On the right is a 1.44 megabyte floppy drive, and beneath that is usually a Platinum-colored 24x CD-ROM drive, but this system has been modded with a black drive. It doesn't eject all the time, so I have to use my external Apple CD 300 from 1993. And then we have the optional Zip 100 drive, which we will talk about more in a moment. The stand also tilts and swivels for convenient repositioning of your 59 1/2-pound tooth.
It's okay, G3. I say it lovingly. I mean, you know, I need to lose some weight too.
But, you know, I'm a carbon-based life form. I can actually lose weight. You're just, you're (beep).
For the I/O, we have DB25 SCSI, Apple Desktop Bus, 10BASE-T ethernet, two serial ports, and DB15 video out. And if you wanted an internal modem card, it would be installed here. This model also has RCA in and out, has video in and out, and audio in and out. These additional ports were part of an optional AV card which connected to the perch slot on the logic board. And once I fire this baby up, we'll take that card for a spin.
Oh, here's another feature you don't see often on all-in-one Macs: expansion slots. There's three 33 megahertz PCI slots, and I'm using one for 100-meg ethernet right now. And to add cards and to access other components, all you have to do is remove these four screws and the back slides out like a drawer.
And you might have noticed I installed a USB card on the system as well. All right, that's in there and we'll close her up, assuming this computer is a her, I don't know. (Ken grunts) Nice and crunchy. Bon appetit. Now, I want to circle back to the Zip drive because I don't think I've ever talked about this type of storage before, at least not in a long time. This particular Mac probably had a Zip drive originally because the badge on the back says it did, but it's not in there anymore, so it must have been taken out at some point.
But whether or not it has it, we should still talk about this technology. Zip was a removable high-capacity disc storage system developed by Iomega. The original drive and discs were shipped on March 24th, 1995, and the disks could hold 100 megabytes of data. This was a lot of storage space for 1995, considering the popular floppy disk format could only hold 1.44 megabytes.
By 2003, over 50 million Zip drives and over 315 million Zip discs had been sold. But despite these big numbers, it wasn't popular enough to replace the tried and true 3 1/2-inch floppy disc. And as hard drive prices came down and rewriteable CDs gained traction, Zip disks and drives became less economical, especially in the early 2000s when flash drives started going mainstream. So this is why you'll see 3 1/2-inch floppy drives on Macs starting in 1984, and then in '96/'97, you'll see Zip drives mixed in as Apple started phasing out floppies, and five years later, the Power Mac G4 QuickSilver was the last Mac to officially offer a Zip option. It's been a fun ride. Now, some may say this Mac is beauty challenged, but real beauty comes from the inside, and by that I mean the specs.
The Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One shipped with a PowerPC 750 G3 processor at 233 or 266 megahertz depending on your configuration. This particular model has a 266. The system also uses PC66 SDRAM and officially supports up to 384 megabytes.
But if you're sneaky, you can unofficially install up to 768. For storage, Apple offered a four gigabyte hard drive, but this model has been upgraded with 80 gigabytes. For graphics, this Mac featured an ATI 3D Rage II+ with two megabytes of video memory, which could be upgraded to six, but that was only if you had a Molar Mac shipped before May 1st, 1998. From that date onward, Apple replaced the II+ with an upgraded ATI 3D Rage Pro.
And to power it all, this Mac uses a 300-watt power supply. The specs could be customized with Apple's build-to-order features on their online store. And fun fact, this was actually one of the first Macs to be sold through the online store, and I think that's worth mentioning because the online store is huge. It's still used today. And this guy was here in the early days. Good for you.
Now let's look at the software. This Mac originally shipped with Mac OS 8.1, but we have 9.2.2 installed on this unit. The documentation says this Mac can run up to Mac OS 10.2.8 Jaguar, but I cannot get the CD to boot.
I tried my Mac OS X Jaguar CD and I got the Ghostbuster symbol. Then I tried my Mac OS X Cheetah CD, which is a bit older, and I got the broken folder icon. I tried using the internal CD drive and I tried using my external CD drive, nothing worked. Turns out this could be a more widespread issue and it's not just The Krazy Ken Curse trying to attack me.
According to a 1998 CNET article, Troy Barkmeier reported issues booting from CD-R and CD-RW discs on Molar Macs and he has recreated this problem multiple times. So I guess no OS X for now? But that's okay. We don't need it anyway. Mac OS 9 is great. Now let's test out that AV card.
I have some plug-and-play TV games and if I want to play them on my Macintosh screen, I simply plug the RCA cables into the AV card, and boom. For some reason, I can't get sound to work in Apple Video Player, but in Avid Cinema, I can get both sound and picture to work. I can also record a movie with Apple Video Player or capture footage directly into Avid Cinema.
And with my Digi Makeover by Girl Tech, I can capture my face with the built-in camera and trap it inside this Macintosh forever. Now, Avid Cinema I think is pretty interesting because I didn't even know about it until recently, but basically it was Apple's solution to simplified video editing on the Mac before iMovie existed. Avid is widely known for Media Composer, which is the industry standard for Hollywood film editing, but in the '90s, Avid offered a simplified video editing program exclusively through Apple named Avid Cinema. The tabbed interface takes users through the steps needed to make a good video. The Storyboard tab helps you plan the movie.
The Bring Video In tab lets you capture video and save it to the hard drive. Edit Movie gives you editing tools. And Send Movie Out lets you export the edited video to a VCR or a movie file. The Editing tab provides a four-track timeline for video, titles, voiceover, and music, and it actually scrubs quite well. You can also add transitions between clips. All right, Molar Mac, we looked at your design, your features, your specs, and your software.
It looks like you're ready to go into the classroom and help millions of students further their education. (letter pops) Oh, we just got a letter. It's from Apple. Cool. You're famous. (Ken laughs) They said no.
Unfortunately, sorry, unfortunately, the Molar Mac did not last long in Apple's product line. It seemed like a good computer though. So what the heck happened? On May 6th, 1998, Apple revealed the iMac, a completely new all-in-one personal computer ready for the internet. Yep, May 6th, which was about a month after this thing launched.
But to be fair, the iMac wouldn't actually go on the market until August. Again, the iMac focused on the future with an all-new design and a ditched legacy IO in favor of USB. The system was 40 pounds, much lighter than the Molar Mac, and it was more affordable too.
1,299 for the general market and 1,199 for education customers. Apple started shipping the iMac on August 15th, 1998, and by that time, the Molar Mac was only on the market for about four months. Why did Apple release similar G3 All-In-One computers so close to each other? I can't say for sure, but if I had to guess, the Molar Mac was merely a stopgap product to buy Apple some time while they were working on the iMac, or maybe they would release both computers and see which one sold better or which one performed in a certain market better. I can't say for sure.
But what I can say is the iMac completely overshadowed the Molar Mac. Heck, even in all the books and movies I've read and watched about Apple and Steve Jobs and the big comeback, the iMac is often mentioned, but never the Molar Mac. I think that's understandable. The iMac made a huge impact in the computer world, selling million units in the first 2 1/2 years, and the iMac line still exists today.
In fact, the original iMac was so popular, eMachines even wanted to make their own version. I'm sure Apple won't sue over that, right? That's a good episode too. Feel free to check it out.
Sadly, the Molar Mac's life was short. According to some sources, it was discontinued on September 1st, 1998, but Apple's official support page states it was discontinued on January 1st, 1999. Then four days after the official cancellation, Apple announced the all-new Power Mac G3. Beige was gone, and it was clear Apple was moving in a new direction with a new design language and new technology. - [Steve Jobs] We just open this thing here and there it is. (audience cheers) - So rest in peace, Molar Mac.
You weren't even nine months old. But in the famous words of Steve Jobs, there is one more thing, when we come back. (door whirring, locks latch) Hey, everyone, I just wanted to let you know that I have a Patreon with tons of awesome perks, so if you'd like to support me and get some great stuff in return, head over to patreon.com/krazyken. Thank you. (door whirring) (EXPLOSION!) (angelic music) What? What's this?! Could this be... a resurrection?
Despite the Molar Mac's death in 1999, Apple introduced a new Mac on April 29th, 2002, which I believe is the spiritual successor to the Molar Mac. Introducing the eMac, and you'll never guess what the E stands for. Empanadas. (tone beeps) Education. That's right, just like the Molar Mac, the eMac was released exclusively for education customers. And just like the Molar Mac, it was heavy, 50 pounds, Apple's second heaviest all-in-one.
The eMac's purpose was to be a more affordable iMac G4, selling for $999 instead of $1,299. The eMac featured an all-white design with a curvy shape similar to the original iMac, and on the front is a 17-inch flat CRT display with resolutions up to 1280 by 960. For I/O, eMac had audio in and out, three USB ports, two FireWire 400 ports, a modem jack, 100 meg ethernet, and mini VGA. You can also add an optional AirPort card for wifi. On the front are the speakers, microphone, and I just love this little door, a CD-ROM drive, which could be upgraded to a DVD-ROM and CD-RW combo drive. For specs, eMac has a 700 or 800 megahertz PowerPC G4 processor, 128 megabytes of RAM upgradable to one gig, a 40-gigabyte hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce2 MX for graphics.
The hardware combined with the software Apple included, and they included a lot, made eMac a great value for classrooms, especially at that $999 price point. Demand for the eMac actually got so high that in June 2002, Apple made it available to the public and Apple kept releasing new models for several years until July 5th, 2006, when they introduced a new 899 17-inch Intel iMac for education customers, thus putting an end to the eMac's glorious four-year life. Also, this was the end of an era for Apple because the eMac was the last Apple product to use a CRT display, which Apple used in the Mac line for 22 1/2 years, since the beginning.
The eMac definitely lasted a lot longer than the Molar Mac, but perhaps the Molar Mac walked so the eMac could run. So at the beginning of today's episode, I said the Molar Mac meant something to me on a deeper personal level and I'd like to elaborate on that. In 2017, I was losing interest in retro tech. I know, that might surprise a lot of you. Frankly, at that time, I was already losing interest in it for a few years.
But then I found this Molar Mac video on YouTube and it was by Snazzy Labs. This is actually how I discovered Snazzy. And I watched it, I liked the presentation style, and I liked learning about this obscure Mac, and I thought, "This is pretty cool.
I should make a show about vintage Apple computers," kind of like what I did back in 2012, but with you, you know, more of a budget. And I did. I called it Vintage Apple Vault and it lasted for a whopping seven episodes. But hey, it won a Telly Award for cinematography. Through the production of that show, I met many awesome people in the community, like Steve from Mac84 and Greg Hrutkay from Hrutkay Mods and many others, and my love for retro technology was completely rejuvenated, and it was all thanks to that spark of inspiration I got from the Snazzy Labs video about the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One.
Hey, you never know who you might inspire when you put your creations out there, right? So thank you, Snazzy, thank you, Molar Mac, and thank you to everyone who has watched my shows and to everyone who has helped make them. And when I make more, I hope to see you all there. Until then, catch the crazy and pass it on. (upbeat music) (static crackling) (email chimes) Ooh, I got email. Let's see. "Dear Krazy Ken, the signal jammer will only be in effect for about 30 seconds, so read this message immediately.
For years I've been trying to break you out of your lair 10 stories underground. The people holding you there against your will are more powerful than I originally thought and this operation is way behind schedule. Stick to the status quo, but be prepared for future communications and/or a visit from me. Sincerely, the Delivery Man." (dramatic music) Delivery Man? "P.S. In case the signal jammer isn't working, don't read this out loud."
OH SH- I mean, seriously, why wouldn't you put that warning at the top, you SON OF A B-
2025-04-19 03:18
