As long as I’ve known him, my husband has had a hankering for an old style iMac G3 – the iconic ones with the big plastic back that came in a range of bright colours. A few years ago when we started thinking about kids James decided that whenever we had our first child, they should have one of these museum pieces as their first computer – I think this is partly a defence tactic so they don’t destroy our rather more expensive modern iMac!
Since Christmas, he has been playing with this idea again, and managed to buy a decent spec one last week to play with. I’m not really sure who it’s for – him to tinker with as his latest geeky project, or Georgie to play on! Either way, they both seem to love it!
We have set the computer up in Georgie’s room, which is somewhat adorable. Around the time we got married we bought an Ivar desk from Ikea, which has been moved from pillar to post and now (as of last week) lives in our baby’s room, of all places. The beautiful thing about the Ivar shelving system is that it is very customisable and so you can put the desk at any height. My lovely friend Carly gave Georgie a personalised toddler chair for Christmas, and so we have set the desk up at the right height for the chair – and my little girl loves it! She gets really excited whenever she sits at the desk on her chair, and also seems to like to stand up holding onto the desk while she plays with her toys or the computer.
The only thing I am a little sad about is that James bought a snow (white) one instead of one of the fancy bright colours. But I guess it’s what is inside that counts, and it is one of the models with a DVD drive so I’m happy! It is amazing how good it is when you use it, considering it is nearly 12 years old (it is the ‘DV SE Summer 2000‘ model) and hasn’t had any upgrades since it was purchased. James is going to double the memory which will make it even zippier. It runs Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger which came out in 2005 – can you imagine a Windows PC lasting so long with no upgrades, and having an operating system 5 years younger than the computer run well?
I have locked down the parental controls, enabled simple finder, and installed AphaBaby. It surprised me just how good the Apple operating system was for kids – the simplified finder makes it much easier to launch applications and look at documents, and no matter what Georgie presses or hits, she can’t do anything to the computer other than make mad text documents or something along those lines! You can limit the internet browser to certain websites, and even list the email addresses that are allowed to be emailed which is handy. It even eliminates the need to double-click on app icons to launch them – you just click once instead – much easier for little hands.
Until she is old enough to use them unattended, the keyboard & mouse will be detached from the iMac most of the time so that she can’t do herself any damage with the cables. I have installed Rowmote so that James & I can control it with our iPhones if the keyboard and mouse aren’t attached – handy if we just want to put a DVD in and need to navigate the menus.
As Georgie gets older we can install different apps to suit her age, she will be able to watch DVDs on it, and learn how to type etc. This will last us years – after all it’s already 11+ years old and still going strong. Not bad for less than the cost of one of those crappy plastic “laptops” with the dodgy screens!
Oh my goodness, I have a pink one if these in the shed!! Time to get it out and give it to my little girl, great idea! x
Haha I just read out this comment to my husband and he replied "in the SHED? What's it doing in the SHED?!" as if you have commited some sort of crime by storing it away! You should definitely get it out though, it's amazing how good it is after all this time! I will be keeping an eye out and blogging any great PPC kids apps I find to run on it 😀