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If you took off the metal door on the outside of the G5, you’d be prompted by a clear plastic second door, this one there to keep the entire thermal container sealed. In the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs boasts about how it’s got nine fans, but you won’t hear them because they’re all individually computer controlled. The G5 was all about moving air around intelligently and quietly. The 2013 Mac Pro, on the other hand, famously failed because it couldn’t keep its components cool enough, leading Apple into a “ thermal corner” from which it couldn’t escape.

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Consider the two pro Macs that bracket this design: the previous tower, the final Power Mac G4, was nicknamed the “wind tunnel” because of its loud, aggressive fan noise. With 17 years of hindsight, the thing that sticks out the most about the G5’s design is just how obsessed it was about moving air around.

It was an unusual way to do that story, right down to my insistence that we quote them at length and refer to them by their nicknames, Joz and Ruby. Back then, it generated three pages of photos showing both sides of the G5 motherboard, the inside of the case, and the front and back of the computer’s exterior, complete with quotes from both of them. Today, that would be a podcast interview, and maybe a YouTube video. For an hour, we stood around an opened-up G5 and walked through every little corner of that tower, as they told story after story about why particular design decisions had been made. Greg Jozwiak-who still frequently takes to the stage at Apple events-represented product marketing and Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s SVP of hardware engineering was there for the engineering side. My daughter ended up with a new Apple onesie out of the deal. person (I wish I could remember who she was!) took them to the Company Store while I went into the executive briefing center. for the weekend, so we ended up stopping at Infinite Loop on the way south. My wife and our one-year-old daughter and I were driving down to L.A. Macworld Expo in New York was coming up, so the only time we could meet was on the afternoon of July 3, the day before the long Independence Day weekend. The Power Mac G5 was announced at WWDC in 2003 as “the world’s fastest personal computer.” Steve Jobs pointed out it was also the first 64-bit processor in a desktop computer, proudly trumpeting Apple’s partnership with IBM to create the G5 processor, which was replacing the Motorola-built PowerPC G4 at the top of Apple’s product line.Īpple was proud of the hardware design, so proud that I managed to score a hands-on briefing where I could walk through the design decisions with Apple execs for a cover story in Macworld.

Like its predecessor, the 2019 Mac Pro also looks like nothing more than a giant box grater.

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The G5 design, with a front panel punched so full of holes that it was 65 percent aluminum and 35 percent air, was so logical for a computer packed full of hot, high-powered components that after a six year hiatus, Apple brought back a Mac Pro that is deeply inspired by the design of the original. The Power Mac G5 design represented the high-end Mac tower for a decade, keeping its distinctive look outside while adapting and changing on the inside. In the early 2000s, colorful computers were for consumers and monochrome computers were for serious computer users. In the summer of 2003, Apple introduced an entirely new Mac tower, one that traded the cute colorful plastic of the Power Mac G3 and the more subdued gray and silver plastic of the Power Mac G4 for a more serious industrial design, clad in aluminum. Time and trends and Apple’s own predilections have led us to a world, two decades later, where the only Mac that fits these criteria starts at $6,000, but back then the desktop tower was the Mac.

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As defined by the standards of the 90s and early 2000s, these were real computers-boxes you could open up and swap hard drives, install RAM, stick in expansion cards, maybe even upgrade the processor itself.

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In this context, it’s easy to underestimate just how much importance the professional Mac tower had in the mind of the Mac world back in the day. And as for that consumer desktop, the G3 iMac was a wild success 1, but for years the real Mac users looked down on it as a weird, underpowered toy that wasn’t suited for getting real work done 2. There was no consumer laptop in Apple’s product line until the iBook was announced. After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late ’90s, he famously simplified the company’s product line by drawing a four-product grid: consumer desktop (the bulbous, brightly colored G3 iMac), consumer laptop (then, just an empty space), professional desktop (the Power Mac, first the blue-and-white G3 and then the G4), and professional laptop (the PowerBook).

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