My idea to focus on collecting vintage Macs started with the iMac — the all-in-one computer that saved Apple in the late 90s. I saw someone selling a slot-loading iMac G3 and thought it would be interesting to have one, because it looked so good. Later I realized that what I really wanted was the original 1998 tray-loading model, and bought that one too. Now I have the whole magic quadrant by Steve Jobs:

My collection expanded from there (including the original Macintosh), but all-in-one computers Apple made over the years hold a special place in my heart. And I thought I knew them all, until I heard about a mysterious Power Mac G3 All-in-One.

I thought I had all the Power Mac G3 models covered — a horizontally-oriented desktop, a beige mini tower, and the later “Blue and White” Yosemite tower (the one in the picture above). But a couple of years ago I saw someone mention a “Molar” Power Mac, and I became a little obsessed. I looked into that, read a bit about it, decided I want one. A few options on eBay were listed for an unreasonable $1,500, and all of them were located far away. But I just knew I wanted this Power Mac G3 in my collection — because of how strange it looked, and because it had to be the closest relative to the original iMac there was; basically a long-forgotten iMac’s brother. Released around the same time, built on the same architecture, and yet somehow not a lot of people know about it. Sounds like a must-have.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to pick one up from someone selling it on Facebook Marketplace in Delaware: it works, it’s in decent shape, and it’s mine. (I also bought another one a couple of months ago from someone in Ohio, which is currently stored at a friend’s place there. I need to drive 6.5 hours each way to pick it up. Going from zero to two Molars in the span of two months is either very good luck or a mild problem, depending on how you look at it.) Anyway, now I can tell you everything I’ve learned about it.

What it is and who it was for

The official name is Power Macintosh G3 All-in-One. You can read all the official specs of it here on Apple’s website. The internal codename was Artemis, and the nickname — well, if you look at the machine head-on, the silhouette really does look like a human molar tooth, so the community landed on the right answer there.

It’s beige (very beige), with translucent perforated plastic across the top and back that was clearly a preview of the design language Apple was developing for the iMac, which will arrive very soon afterwards.

Apple quietly introduced the All-in-One on April 3, 1998, as a replacement for the Power Macintosh 5400 and 5500 in the education market. Steve Jobs unveiled the iMac on May 6, 1998 to much fanfare a month later. AIO was sold exclusively to schools and universities in North America — never in retail, never to consumers, never outside North America at all. This is one of the main reasons it’s so rare today, and why prices for working units are higher than you might expect for a beige box from 1998.

Every design decision on this machine points at its intended environment. The logic board sits on a slide-out tray — you pull it out like a server drawer, swap whatever needs swapping, push it back in. The rear ports are recessed so the machine can sit flush against a wall. And the front panel has two headphone jacks, so two students can listen to audio simultaneously. That last detail is small but telling: someone at Apple actually thought about how kids use a computer in a classroom, rather than just taking a regular Mac and applying a school discount.

The machine weighed about 60 pounds (around 27 kg), which made it the heaviest Mac Apple had shipped to that point — and, as far as I can tell, ever. Setting one up is genuinely a two-person job, although I suspect that they made it so heavy so the kids wouldn’t easily drop in off a table. Once it’s in place, though, you just connect power, keyboard, and mouse, and that’s it — everything else is already inside, which is exactly what you want when a teacher is expected to set up thirty of these.

The hardware

Under the hood, the All-in-One is built on Apple’s Gossamer motherboard, running a PowerPC 750 (G3) processor at either 233 or 266 MHz. The G3’s “backside” level 2 cache — which communicates with the CPU at full processor speed rather than through the slower system bus — gave these machines a real-world advantage over anything running comparable clock speeds on the older lookaside cache architecture. People who run Mac OS 9 on a Molar Mac today consistently say it feels faster than they expected. Having now used mine, I can confirm that. It can even handle Mac OS X “Jaguar”, but I wouldn’t do that to it.

There was also a “personality card” system — an expansion slot on the motherboard populated with a card that added audio and multimedia capabilities. The base 233 MHz model shipped with the “Whisper” card for standard audio I/O. The 266 MHz model came with the “Wings” card, adding S-Video and composite input/output for video capture. It’s a modular approach that let Apple configure the machine differently for a science classroom versus a media lab — the kind of thoughtful expandability that schools actually needed, and the kind of thing Apple would never do today (whether that’s a good thing depends on your relationship with soldered RAM).

The iMac connection

Here’s what makes the All-in-One genuinely fascinating: it and the original iMac G3 are, underneath their completely different exteriors, essentially the same computer. Both were built on the Gossamer motherboard, used the PowerPC 750 G3 on a 66 MHz bus with PC66 SDRAM, shipped with ATI Rage Pro graphics — the All-in-One was actually updated to the Rage Pro in May 1998, the same chip Apple put into the iMac that August. Both were among the first Macs to use IDE/ATA as the primary storage interface, replacing SCSI.

Apple clearly developed both on the same platform simultaneously and tuned each for its target market. Looking at the differences between them is basically a clean diagram of what “education” required versus what “consumer” required in 1998.

FEATURE	ALL-IN-ONE	IMAC G3
Motherboard	Gossamer	Gossamer
Processor	PowerPC G3 (750)	PowerPC G3 (750)
Graphics	ATI Rage Pro	ATI Rage Pro
Floppy drive	Yes	No
Peripheral bus	ADB (legacy)	USB (new)
SCSI	Onboard	None
PCI expansion	3 slots	None
Logic board access	Slide-out tray	Pretty hard to reach
Headphone jacks	Two	One
Market	Education only	General consumer

The iMac stripped out all the legacy interfaces — ADB, SCSI, the floppy — added USB, sealed the case, and wrapped everything in translucent Bondi Blue plastic for living rooms. The All-in-One kept those legacy ports because schools had rooms full of ADB keyboards, SCSI scanners, and floppy disks still in active daily use. Neither decision was wrong; they were solving for completely different environments. The iMac got the cultural moment, the All-in-One got the slide-out tray. Also All-in-One kept the title of “the last Macintosh with a floppy”, although as I discovered, the floppy drive in the unit I have, does not work – another project to fix, yay!

Why nobody remembers it

The timing was brutal. The All-in-One launched April 3, 1998. Steve Jobs announced the iMac on May 6 — thirty-three days later — and it went on sale in August. From that point forward, nobody in the tech press had much reason to pay attention to the education-only beige machine when there was a translucent blue cultural phenomenon to cover. The All-in-One was discontinued January 1, 1999, having spent its entire commercial life in the iMac’s shadow despite technically predating it and being nearly identical inside.

Its education-only distribution made things worse in the long run. It never sat on a shelf in a store, so most people never encountered one outside of a school computer lab — and even there, it would have been replaced and forgotten within a few years. The ones that survived ended up in storage rooms, then surplus sales, then occasionally on eBay at prices that seem unreasonable until you understand how few of them are left in working condition. I already mentioned the extremely brittle plastic that makes mailing them long distance a “no go”.

Practically speaking, it runs Mac OS 9 very well, accepts IDE drives up to 128 GB with the right setup, and can take USB and FireWire cards in those three PCI slots — so it’s a genuinely usable vintage Mac, not just a display piece. The slide-out logic board tray makes it easier to work on than most things Apple has made before or since. The two headphone jacks on the front still work. The floppy drive and the zip-drive added to the data-transfer tools, but in my case the floppy drive does not work, and this AIO I have has its zip-drive removed.

“Assembled in the USA”, those were the times. It’s a strange machine to have found its way into my collection: thoughtfully designed for a specific purpose, technically on par with one of the most iconic computers Apple ever made, and almost completely forgotten because it arrived at the wrong moment and sold through the wrong channel. Now I have two of them, which is either a sign of dedication or a problem I should discuss with someone. Probably both.

PS it would be unfair not to mention an eMac, which is short for “education Mac”, another all-in-one Mac Apple has released in 2002 specifically for the education market. I never especially liked it, although I see a lot of them for sale on the marketplace. It was even sold through general retail to consumers at some point, and after it was discontinued, Apple would never create machines specifically for the education market. There were some education models of iMac G5 and iMac Intel Core 2 Duo, but Power Mac G3 All-in-One and eMac were in a league of their own.