At some point the absolute savings from older equipment stops being worth even a few hours of admin time, even completely ignoring major security issues. Neither of these are in any way "supported", and are completely off the deep end as far as I'm concerned in terms of value. Apple ditched distribution on DVD a while ago and I don't think you can still download those old versions. Make sure that if you have to (re)install the OS, you have a way to do it. But: 2 - 3 GB RAM at most and PowerPCs are s l o w by modern standards.
This is getting fairly ancient, but as ancient goes it's not too terrible, you can still find some software that will run on it if you look hard enough.
So you'll need to stick with mostly older, more modest software. No memory compression and probably only 3 GB RAM supported. This probably means 10.7 or 10.8, which are already quite long in the tooth. The advantage is that AFAIK all of these support 4 GB RAM and the OS supports memory compression, so you can run the latest software and run it fairly comfortably. Those go back to mid-2007 for some models, and I think everything since 2009. A machine that can run 10.11, the current OS. This year they are upping the system requirements for the first time in three years. Same with a notebook really, check them all and see if there are any great deals, since any of them could do the job even if you never intend to use the portability.
A friend grabbed a quad core Mac Pro 4,1 (2009) from a business dumping them when he was originally looking for a mini because it was $200. As far as a Mac Pro goes it's overkill for you, but if someone was trying to dump one for a song then hey easy access internals are a nice bonus, and you never know what will turn up used by chance. I'm seeing plenty of Mac Mini 2010 models or even later for example in the $150-300 range, I don't think trying to squeeze out an extra $50 or whatever buying truly ancient hardware is worth the extra headaches. Actually, looking around at pricing on ebay and my own local CL, I'm going to revise and say don't go before 2010 unless it's a Mac Pro, where a 2008 or 2009 is fine. I'd found a C2D with 2GB RAM and 10.7.5 (circa 2007-8 IIRC) on it for 99$, but so far I've held off.
If for some reason you specifically wanted an old version though then I'd say the bare minimum to aim for would be 10.9, which is rapidly becoming the new basic target for a lot of software support, and probably you'd want to go to 10.10 given that 10.12 is on the way.īut since you're starting from scratch anyway and thus don't have any upgrade woes or installed legacy to think about I'd really suggest going right to 10.11, it'll save you further upgrade hassle later and mean you don't have to think about it for a few years if you don't want to. Finally, at this point in the OS schedule we're well past the X.0 bugs, the most recent one has received 5 significant updates and is fine to jump to.
Basically, anything you'd want to buy anyway, even something 8 years old (long past the point of diminishing returns in used pricing), will run everything up to the latest version of OS X, and OS X upgrades don't cost any money either.
Like smitty825 said, unless you had some very specific needs at this point I see no reason to not just get the latest 10.11, which will run fine on Macs going back to 2008 so long as they have sufficient RAM (which is dirt cheap enough at this point that it's easy to toss in some more, even maxing out a recent Mac Mini with a full 16 GB of high quality memory memory is only about $60, and 8GB is fine) and a basic SSD. Win7 equivalent will do, I plan on testing the waters of Mac land, I don't need cutting edge. I'm looking for the equivalent in Apple land. In Windows terms, 99% of all software out there still supports WIn7.