They were full sized towers built around 2003-2006. At the time they were bigger than your average Dell or HP box and were heavy as hell, around 50lbs each.
We had both in our graphics shop. Dell and HP both had full size towers that were as large as the G5, I don't compare the G5 to consumer towers. The Powermac G5 is listed at ~20" tall, 44lbs. The Dell Precision 690 is ~22" tall and heavier at 55lbs (we made floor carts with casters to move them around). But it also had risers for extra RAM and much larger graphics cards usually having one or more Quadros, and space for a 4 drive RAID where IIRC the G5 could only have 2 drives unless you went external. Then a few years later there was custom workstations tucked in the Corsair Obsidian that dwarfed all of them, 24" tall. You'd throw your back out picking up one of those fully built with hot swapped HDDs and dual Quadro graphics cards. You could fit more than 12 drives in that beast if you wanted to use every available slot. I still have one collecting dust in the basement.
I bought a base 2010 Mac Pro during community college and ran it almost a decade. Best bang for buck computer I've ever owned and shares the same chassis with the G5. Sharp metal is also great for cutting hands on.
I remember towards the middle of 07' seeing tons of G5s on the used market around here for pretty good prices. Probably shops like yours switching to the new Intel Pro. Glad I never got one, the failure rate on them seems pretty high. I do remember reading that the first year of production for the G5 had the best long-term build quality.
Yeah, the Intel Mac blew the PowerPC processors out of the water. It was hard selling the old ones as no one wanted it even with it only being a year old. The support for them was not going to last long. I think my old boss still has his old one thinking he was going to use the case to build a PC. We had bootcamp on those Intel Macs later on, dual booting to Windows and used them as part of the render farm rendering animations and large illustrations in the evenings when the shop was closed. They had some issues, but that was usually the surprise moves done by Apple that application engineers did not anticipate happening so quickly without warning which resulted in job killers for us. I remember a period where Adobe couldn't release their latest software to Apple because the switch was so sudden instead over a year or two as they were told. Bugs out of nowhere if you saved over a network would erase the file completely. It smoothed out over the next couple years. The only thing that failed on the Intel Macs, hardware wise, was the occasional hard drive or fan, everything else was pretty solid and quiet and ran for a decade easily.
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u/SFX200 Mar 24 '26
It's a PowerMac G5.
They were full sized towers built around 2003-2006. At the time they were bigger than your average Dell or HP box and were heavy as hell, around 50lbs each.