No, we’ve not lost the plot.

In previous installments, we’ve shown you how you can buy a used desktop or laptop PC for under £50.  Following on from that I received a bet from a friend that I couldn’t do the same with an Apple Mac.

Of course; I accepted the bet, but I did have myself worried for a while.  Mac’s are notoriously expensive.  In fact, the cheapest new Mac that you can buy today is £612, and that’s the runt of the litter.  Mac’s also hold their value better than PC’s, had I bitten off more than I could chew?

I decided it would be pointless me sitting here and telling you how you can buy a Mac for less than £50.  To win this bet I was going to have to actually do it, so I started looking around in a few different places to see what turned up.

The classified ad’s in the paper were next to useless; Mac’s just aren’t popular enough that you can stumble across them in amongst the sea of old PC’s and laptops.  Likewise the free-ads in supermarkets and newsagent’s didn’t give me much in the way of choice.  There was some hope from a few Apple web forums, but people generally wanted more than I was willing to pay.  I was going to have to brave the online auction sites if I had any chance of achieving this goal.

Thankfully, eBay make it pretty simple to search for things in your local area.  I went on to the UK site, selected the Apple Mac category and hit search.  Nothing within 10 miles, but what’s this?  A seller in Northampton, some 25 miles away, selling a dozen or so eMac’s starting at £18 each.  Could be on to a winner here, there was still 3 days to go on the auction so I made a note of the item number and then had a bit of a read up on the eMac.

 

The Apple eMac

Originally released in late 2002, the “e” stood for “education”, these machines were aimed exclusively (at least, to begin with) at the education sector as a cheaper alternative to the first of the “flat screen” iMac machines.

They were significantly faster than the original iMac, and featured Motorola PowerPC G4 processors ranging from 700MHz to 1.42GHz.  For those not too familiar with Mac’s; prior to 2006 Apple machines didn’t use Intel processors.  They used processors made by IBM and Motorola which, although slower in terms of clock speed, held their own with the latest Windows based PC’s.  In a sense, a 700MHz G4 processor is comparable to an Intel processor of around 1.5GHz.

Like the original iMac, they used the older “CRT” display, as opposed to a flatscreen, which made them quite bulky but helped keep the price down.

There were several revisions over the years, and then it was eventually replaced in 2006 with a low-end version of the iMac, again aimed primarily at the education sector.

Unlike most modern Mac’s, the eMac was also quite easy to upgrade.  The RAM, hard disk and optical drive could all be upgraded with relative ease, and there were official kits available to add a wireless card as well.

The last version of the eMac featured an IBM PowerPC G4 processor running at 1.42GHz, 256MB of memory, a 160GB hard disk and an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card.

By this point I was getting quite excited, I knew that the eMac I was watching was one of the earlier ones, but I liked what I had read about them being quite easy to upgrade.  The listing also said that this particular machine was from a technical college and had a fair bit of software installed.  I watched the auction until the closing seconds and then bid with around 10 seconds to go.

I was the proud owner of an £18 eMac.

 

Next Page:  The £18 eMac