Behold! The Molar Mac

molar_mac

A while back, I asked, “How many Macs are too many?” I asked this after realizing that I have, at this time, three working Macs surrounding my Nerve Center here at home.

Newton Poetry reader Rand Careaga chimed in with his impressive suite of Macs, including the above beauty: an all-in-one G3 PowerMac, also known as the Molar Mac.

Like the eMac after it, the Molar Mac was designed for the education market, where the look-ma-no-mess-of-wires design was attractive. And hence the name: the thing looked like a giant tooth.

A giant heavy tooth: they were almost 60 lbs. heavy, and that’s only with a 15″ CRT screen. As the Washington Apple Pi Journal puts it in their hilarious (and comprehensive) post:

While it is possible for a single large, stupid person to uncrate one (or even six) of these without assistance, Don’t Do This. The machines are heavy, and the boxes are deep. You can fall into a box and never be heard from again. You can rupture vital organs of a personal nature. Accept the fact that this is a two-person task.

The All-In-One G3 came before the iMac, meaning no USB ports. It did come with serial and ADB ports for peripherals, as well as a floppy disk drive.

Molar Macs came in two speeds, 233 MHz PowerPC and 266 Mhz, meaning they run at the same clockspeed as the original iMacs, and shipped with 32 MB of RAM. For their time, these were speedy machines. And speedy to set up, too, thanks to their all-in-one design.

Sadly, I’ve never seen one in person. Any Molar Mac owners out there that can speak to their uniqueness?

7 comments.

  1. I had a G3 AIO for a while. It was retired from my local school system and was (I think) a 233. I upgraded it to a 333 MHz processor from a G3 tower, loaded ‘er up with RAM and a bigger hard drive, and had a nice enough OS X machine.

    Washington Apple Pi is right, though. They are monsters – heavy and the general dimensions are huge too. Not the most attractive Mac around, but certainly a performer for the time. Mine even had the AV Personality Card, which gave it S-Video input and output.

  2. Thanks for sharing, Jake. What eventually happened to your Molar?

  3. I’ve never owned one of these, but I remember my elementary school’s library having one. I thought it was pretty amazing at the time.

  4. This is one of the Macs on my list of desirable Macintoshes.

  5. I might want one just for the workout.

  6. […] a fun e-mail from Oklahoma: Just came from your Newton Poetry site and saw your remarks about the Molar Mac. I have one that I would like to sell. I’m moving and as you mentioned this beautiful Mac […]

  7. I recently got the Molar Mac that was retired from my middle school and I added 2 USB serial ports(which was not included) and now I could plug my flash drive and my wireless mouse. Even now, the computer runs at a decent speed. Not the fastest, but faster than my old Windows XP computer. Since I have the tower version of the G3, I’m planning to switch the CPU’s because the tower’s CPU’s are faster than the AIO.

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