3 posts tagged “ibook”

How many computers do you have in your house? 
Submitted by Foomper.

I have a Powerbook G4 (now two years ago, since I remember buying it during the 2004 ALCS) and a three-year-old G4 eMac. Those are the functional machines. I also have the following machines stored in the basement:

• Powerbook G3, the machine I used during much of Dotcom (1.0.) The Cadillac of laptops, it was huge, smooth and very comfortable. It also had a cool modular baysso you could swap out the floppy drive and put in a Zip drive.
• iBook G3 DVD special edition, the machine I purchased late in Dotcom and used for the final, terminal phase .It was a very robust machine-kind of looked like a toy, but very robust. This was also the first machine I ever had that had wireless capability, which I added sometime in 2001.
  
• 14" iBook G3 dual-USB, the white square iteration of the iBook, one of the most popular laptops Apple ever made. My step-mom bought this for me in early fall 2002, and I used it all the way up to the time I bought the Powerbook. I loaned it to my cousin who spent a lot of time fighting with Apple to fix it (since it had three-year Applecare) until he bought a black Macbook. Now I have it again.
  

I don't know what to do with all of these old laptops. They all sort of work, but aren't really that, as they say in the biz "useful." I have an irrational sentimental attachment to all of them. So I don't know what to do. I wish I could donate them somewhere where they might get some use, but it seems like the places that restore computers for use in schools have fallen by the wayside.

I thought I had a picture of all of my old laptops lined up on my desk, but apparently not.

Today Apple finally (after several false starts) announced the new MacBook, their rebranded iBook. They look pretty sweet:

1.83 Ghz Core Duo White, $1,099
-Ships 1-5 Business Days
-60 GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive
-Combo Drive

2.0 Ghz Core Duo White, $1,299
-Ships 1-5 Business Days
-60 GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive
-SuperDrive

2.0 Ghz Core Duo Black, $1,499
-Ships 3-7 Business Days
-80 GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive
-SuperDrive

You have to pay more for black ):. I'm sad to see the iBook nameplate retired, though-I have fond memories of all the iBooks I've owned, going back to my white and dark grey blue iBook DVD I bought in fall 2000.

While cleaning out stuff from the basement here at 123 I found my two dotcom laptops, and decided to see if they still worked at all. Amazingly enough, both do. As you can see from this picture. You can see that on my Powerbook G3 I'm playing Civ II. I set them up side by side with my current Powerbook to show that, over time, Apple did manage to make their laptops a more reasonable shape and size.

Not pictured, unfortunately, is my dual-USB iBook, which I gave to my cousin. He still uses it, though he says it's quite unreliable.

The Powerbook G3 (the one  on the left) was an amazing piece of engineering. I always thought of it as the Cadillac of laptops. I think it's keyboard is the best I've used-much nicer than the one on my current Powerbook. Big screen, nice comfortable hand-rests. Modularly extensible (I have the CD, floppy disk and zip modules.) Of course, it weighed a back-breaking seven pounds, which I don't miss. I lugged that thing back and forth to OffRoad every day for two years.