Liquid Glass may seem like an afterthought on macOS Tahoe, but one person has come up with a way to make the new design language look more appealing on a Mac: put it on an iMac G4, the famous “sunflower” iMac design from over 20 years ago.
Colby Sheets thought that Liquid Glass and the iMac G4’s unique design were made for each other, so he managed to figure out how to display macOS Tahoe on the iMac and posted pictures on X. As you can see in the images below, the decades-old hardware still feels modern with the new interface, and shows just how gorgeous the iMac G4 still is.
macOS Tahoe won’t run on the PowerPC processor that’s in the iMac G4, so how did Sheets do it? Actually, the computer inside isn’t the original one. Back in October 2021, Sheets took an iMac G4 and replaced the innards with those of a M1 Mac mini. Sheets upgraded that modded iMac to Tahoe, and voilà! If the pictures aren’t enough, Sheets posted a video of Tahoe in action on the modded iMac.
In order for the iMac’s display to work with the M1 Mac mini hardware, Sheet said he “rewired the display to a thunderbolt [sic] port.” If seeing Sheet’s posts inspires you to do something similar, but are intimidated by the idea of the work involved in the mod, you could do the next best thing and use Juicy Crumb System’s DockLite G4 to turn the iMac G4 into an external display. You’ll still need to open up the iMac G4 to install the DockLite G4, but it’s not as daunting as swapping out the internals. Then, just connect your new iMac display to your M-series Mac, and you’re all set.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor, Macworld
Roman is a Macworld Senior Editor with over 30 years of experience covering the tech industry, focusing on the Mac and other products in the Apple ecosystem. He is also the host of the Macworld Podcast. His career started at MacUser, where he received Apple certification as a repair technician (when Apple did that kind of thing). He's also worked for MacAddict, MacLife, and TechTV.