I needed to add a DVD burner to my circa 1997 PowerMac G3 (the funky Blue & White) and after tracking down the disassembly instructions, I was successful. The internals of the machine both look and feel more solid and, well, designed, compared to commodity PCs. And the drive was recognized (though System Profiler claimed it wasn’t a burner, while Toast proved otherwise) right off. Now to find some more disk for it (I hate to dump money into such an old and obsolescent box, but the $1800 I would need for a G5 iMac isn’t forthcoming anytime soon: say, could you click on an ad on your way out? Every little helps . . . though Google’s T&C forbid my saying as much).
This old box may be around for years yet (I still have a 1995 vintage 9500, upgraded to a raging 233 MHz 604 processor). These boxes lack the sheer design appeal of a Cube, but they still run and reliably enough to keep them around. I have retired one Intel box that is newer than either of these Macs and the current host that runs this website may see the same fate before too long.