[HN Gopher] Greatest "Classic" Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2...
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Greatest "Classic" Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)
Author : zrules
Score : 69 points
Date : 2023-09-12 08:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.amigalove.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.amigalove.com)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My favorite Mac laptop was my first one, a 12" G4 Powerbook.
| Perfect in every way. I still miss that laptop, used it up until
| OS X Tiger went EOL, and even a little past that with TenFourFox
| browser.
| jwells89 wrote:
| The 12" MacBook was in a lot of ways the spiritual successor to
| the 12" PowerBook and was hard to beat for portability. It's a
| shame it was hobbled by the hot and weak Intel CPUs of its era
| and butterfly keyboard... if they resurrected that form factor
| with an M-series CPU and improved keyboards of modern MacBooks
| it'd be a wonderful little machine.
| majormajor wrote:
| I had a Wallstreet that broke (the hinges were crap and broke,
| and then broke on the first replacement from Apple. Also the
| rubberized texture on the middle of the top case flaked) so it
| got replaced with a Lombard, which shared the clear brown keycaps
| with the Pismo. I always missed the black keycaps from the
| Wallstreet.
|
| The Wallstreet also had a rainbow Apple logo under the screen
| like a proper Mac laptop. ;)
|
| But if you're looking for a retro one, the Wallstreet ones had
| some major reliability issues that they improved in the Lombard
| and Pismo.
|
| A bit silly to talk about how fast installing OS 9 on an SSD is,
| though. The original HD would be way slower.
| classichasclass wrote:
| The Wally does have one advantage over the Pismo: it runs
| Rhapsody the best of any laptop (which is to say merely
| acceptably). If you're into system archaeology and don't want to
| allocate an entire desktop to that purpose, the Wally is a good
| fit. Rhapsody is neat, sort of OS X but where Platinum never
| died.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| I would pay for a really good platinum skin for OS X.
|
| Also, I kinda miss control strip.
| daitangio wrote:
| I have still it and it was ahead of its time. With whopping 196MB
| upgrade and MacOSX 1.0 was a great laptop
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| It's very vaguely reminiscent of the wonderfully swoopy eMate
| 3000 from 1997.
| danbr wrote:
| Apple should bring back the translucent-brown key caps. They're
| awesome.
| gumby wrote:
| I had a Pismo and it was great, but IMHO the greatest of that
| generation was the 2400c which was the _smallest_ powerbook,
| great for anyone who spent a lot of time flying around.
|
| It was designed and built by IBM Japan, which was lucky for me
| when I spilled tea into mine...while I was in Tokyo. I was able
| to get a same day repair by walking it over to some random shop
| in the Akihabara (apple sent me there) where some guy repaired it
| while I watched.
|
| While massive by today's standards, it was svelte for its time,
| and attracted stares whenI would pull it out. Great for operating
| on a plane too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_2400c
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| Came here to also praise the 2400c. I finally restored mine to
| working condition just last week after finding a donor screen
| from a parts machine.
|
| Excellent build quality thanks to IBM Japan who thankfully
| incorporated the inverted T arrow keys, a first for an Apple
| notebook, which still persists to today's MacBooks. The 2400c
| excellent build quality also doesn't suffer from poor hinges
| like the PowerBook 500/5300/1400c models.
|
| The processor is on a daughterboard allowing the 2400c to be
| upgraded to a G3, and the modding scene out of Japan has
| brought a ton of interesting upgrades like translucent cases
| and keyboards.
|
| The main problems the 2400c suffers from are leaky PRAM
| batteries and other issues causing the dreaded Green Light of
| Death (GLoD), where the machine won't boot without hardware
| replacements like a new processor card.
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| atdrummond wrote:
| I've spent years trying to get back to the sub-12" notebooks of
| that era.
|
| I've recently settled on using an iPad Pro 10 inch. I would
| prefer a proper OS but 95% of what I do I can do with iOS.
| gumby wrote:
| I was really happy with the now discontinued 12" macbook. Yes
| it was dog slow, but I did a lot of development on it* and it
| happily traveled with me around the world and back and forth.
| It was so light I would often have to check my bag to see if
| I'd forgotten it. That happens very occasionally with my MBA
| as well, and is a reason I didn't upgrade to the 15-incher.
|
| I think the ipad pro with the "magic keyboard" weighs more
| than a macbook air...?
|
| * Note: I do all my development in Emacs, not a heavyweight
| development system and generally do the builds on a remote
| linux machine so the slowness of the machine wasn't the big
| deal for me that it might have been for others. But
| sometimes, if the network was slow, I compiled locally and it
| was still fast compared to the much older machines we used to
| use!
| gnicholas wrote:
| I loved my 12" Powerbook, but I recognize that the
| size/weight tradeoffs make somewhat larger laptops more
| desirable these days. For example, the bezels are much
| smaller, so a laptop that has the same size footprint as my
| old 12" PB would actually have a larger screen. Laptops are
| also much thinner now, which means that part of what I loved
| about the 12" PB (it's relatively light weight) can now be
| achieved in a larger form factor.
|
| That said, I do also use and enjoy my 10.6" iPad Pro with
| magic keyboard. It's unfortunate that the keyboard has to be
| so heavy, so the whole thing doesn't tip over. It doesn't end
| up being much lighter than my 13" M2 MBA as a result.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| I loved my 2015 Retina Macbook, though it sometimes feels
| like it's a minority opinion given the first gen butterfly
| keyboard and the single USB-C port, but it was exactly what I
| wanted a the time: an iPad-sized device with a keyboard and a
| proper OS.
|
| The current Macbook Air IMHO completely misses the whole
| point of what the Air line stood for, it's really just a
| Macbook Non-Pro, while the Retina MB was the proper Macbook
| air in the lineup.
| amatecha wrote:
| You might like the ThinkPad X230 which is a pretty nice
| compromise between compactness and modernity (can run latest
| Linux/BSD, probably Windows though not sure why someone would
| want to do that lol) .. has been my daily driver for a couple
| years. :)
| cesaref wrote:
| I think the best PowerPC based apple laptop was the Powerbook G4
| titanium. It's pretty much a design classic, was lightweight, and
| ran OS9. It was I think the first Mac that didn't feel like a
| massive compromise when running a laptop vs a desktop machine. It
| introduced widescreen displays, and the 1Ghz model even came with
| a DVD writer if I remember.
|
| It struggled with some design problems, notably that the hinges
| failed, and the display ribbon rubbed causing display problems
| after been opened/closed too many times.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4
|
| If we head back to 68k days, then the Powerbook Duo was awesome.
| This was definitely a compromised machine for portability vs a
| desktop though.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo
| justinator wrote:
| This laptop was destined to be an all-time classic, but they
| could never get the G4 to perform well in a laptop. They
| promised much, delivered little.
|
| They never were able to deliver a G5 laptop. And then Apple
| went Intel, one of the greatest WTFs in recent memory.
| duxup wrote:
| It was a good read.
|
| However, other than the speedy OS upgrade, and maybe a lot of
| ports, I'm not sure what the "better 20 years ago" parts were,
| but maybe that was more of a random line / opinion type thing.
|
| Either way fun read and visually that laptop is still pretty
| pleasing. I love my MBA but ... wouldn't mind if it was a bit
| more organic looking like the G3.
| amatecha wrote:
| better 20 years ago: doesn't spy on you, doesn't auto-update
| and wipe your external drive, doesn't have constant UX
| regressions in every new version, doesn't harass you to sign up
| to cloud services, doesn't hit a network service to validate
| every application you run, can actually be repaired yourself,
| can actually be upgraded yourself... etc.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Imagine a modern MBP letting you turn one screw and release a
| couple of latches to lift out the keyboard for upgrades...
|
| I had a Pismo, which I got with my student discount (and it was
| still crazily expensive I remember, but not quite how much). It
| was a good machine, being able to swap batteries / drives / PC
| cards was slick (sure, now we have usb-c, but where's the
| clever engineering in that?)
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Random trivia, this is the last model where the Apple logo on the
| back of the screen is oriented to be right side up for the user
| when they close the display.
|
| Their next laptop was the G4 titanium, which rotated the logo to
| be right side up when looking at the back of the screen while
| it's open.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The fact that they made it glow when open is what made the
| decision just so weird. The only way it would glow was when it
| was open. So the fact that they made it not glow when they did
| flip it was just all sorts of whathehuh? kind of logic.
| dhosek wrote:
| Non-glowing logo was long after the flipped logo.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| check where the wifi antenna was on the G4, if ifixit still
| has that? or maybe just panel manufacturer specs changed?
| dylan604 wrote:
| did you reply in the wrong place? i'm not following
| theodric wrote:
| The moment they went from premium computing device to status
| symbol?
|
| Out: YOU have a Macintosh
|
| In: $$ THIS GUY $$ has a $$ Macintosh $$
| numpad0 wrote:
| lol no, Macintosh was always a status symbol.
| usrusr wrote:
| In the days of those early G3, every non-stationary
| computer was a status symbol.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| $2500 laptop in 2000 is equivalent to $4,457 in 2023
| dollars
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I do think it's the better way to put it, just interesting to
| note that this is where it flipped.
|
| Couldn't say what the original intent was, I guess if you
| leave the laptop closed on your desk when you aren't using it
| that would be nicer to look at? But realistically I'd see it
| that way for about half a second between closing the laptop
| and sticking it in a bag.
| nlunbeck wrote:
| Iirc it had to do with product designers finding that users
| would try to open the laptop from the wrong end
| MenhirMike wrote:
| I remember the cheers in the audience when Jobs mentioned that
| they rotated the logo.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Didnt thinkpads do the same at some point?
| [deleted]
| scrlk wrote:
| The 2013 models rotated the logo on the lid. This was the
| year where they shipped the awful trackpoint with no physical
| trackpoint buttons, just a big clickpad.
| yankput wrote:
| Not really related but I really like the PhpBB skin
|
| Looks very modern, not really like a "classic" old-style PhpBB
| with tons of annoying icons and signatures.
| nvy wrote:
| Looks like it's a custom fork of a theme called Anami:
| https://themeforest.net/item/anami-responsive-phpbb3-forum-t...
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| Hummm, i still prefered my Ti-book, to be honest, and would be
| very happy for a modern version of it.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Its durability issues aside, the TiBook more or less became the
| template modern laptop. Easily one of the most timeless apple
| portable designs.
| immy wrote:
| versus a 15" Air, what are you missing?
| jonhohle wrote:
| Ports (TiBook had Ethernet, modem, full sized DVI, FireWire,
| USB, optical audio, s-video, and PCMCIA), upgradable memory
| and storage, replaceable battery, and an illuminated Apple
| logo ;-)
|
| I can't remember if it was the 2012 or 2016 MBP, but it was
| about 10 years between the TiBook and the next Apple portable
| with as accurate color representation. It was even longer
| before another Mac laptop had a screen as thin with bezels as
| small.
|
| Picking mine up for the first time in several years, I'm
| shocked at how huge and heavy it was. In its day it was
| 30-50% thinner and lighter than a high end Dell.
| freeqaz wrote:
| My grandma had one of these and I loved it. Great machine!
|
| I definitely prefer a modern machine because of speed,
| portability, and battery life. I'd consider picking up one
| of these just for nostalgia sake though to use for fun side
| projects.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I never owned one of these while they were contemporary (though
| did own a somewhat comparable iMac) but picked a 500Mhz model up
| a couple years ago.
|
| Running OS 9 on modern storage (SSD), it's surprising how
| responsive it is for most tasks with a single core sub-gigahertz
| CPU and RAM capacity below the on-disk size of many apps these
| days. Much of any impression of slowness in day-to-day use when
| it was current was almost certainly a result of its mechanical
| HDD.
| paulmd wrote:
| yeah, it's oft-remarked but it's extremely silly how much
| memory and CPU usage have been inflated over the years. 256MB
| was just fine for gaming in the early days of XP. windows 98 or
| windows 2000 could run pretty nicely on like, 64MB - a lot of
| people ran windows 95 on 16mb even. that's a modern,
| multitasking desktop OS!
|
| and today you can't boot _shit_ on 16MB.even raspbian or
| something is going to croak even with XFCE and the lightest-
| weight setup you can do (short of raw terminal - I did get
| ubuntu server with fbdev running on a thinkpad with 256MB,
| although the mach64 driver is in an absolute state at this
| point).
|
| (menuetOS is a fun regression along this line - a full
| multiprocessing OS with all the fixings, in x86/x64 assembly,
| that fits on a 1.44 inch floppy disk)
|
| https://menuetos.net/
|
| I know that a lot of that power and memory has been spent on
| isolation and security, but part of the reason we need that
| security is because we've turned the browser and OS into a
| sandbox running untrusted code loading off the internet. It is
| interesting to watch this video of linus getting a xserve
| running (challenging due to cert expiration, discontinued
| services, etc), and part of the OSX Server Tools suite is
| things like time machine backup host, ichat host (self-hosted
| XMPP chat server!) and so on, and the point linus makes is that
| apple saw the way the wind was blowing and decided it would be
| more profitable to sell the service than the hardware. And writ
| large that's the tradeoff we've made from the macos 9 era to
| the modern one. Slower, browser-based and cloud-based
| applications instead of self-hosted or local applications.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnj7LvhvR4
|
| Anyway yes, I have done the same thing as you and original OP
| and put a mSATA drive in an IDE adapter to get an old machine
| running, and used a SATA SSD to juice up a cheap laptop when my
| nice one died in grad school, etc, and a SSD and maxing out the
| memory (if possible) does make a substantial difference.
|
| People usually tend to think like "it's an old machine, it is
| running slow anyway" but actually I think it's the opposite and
| you should think "it's an old machine _and it needs all the
| help it can get_ ". It has little enough processing power
| already, at least let it progress at the rate of processing and
| not spend 3/4ths of its cycles waiting for disk!
| DookieBiscuit wrote:
| I grew up and spent the majority of my life in Pismo Beach, CA
| and never knew this existed.
| dylan604 wrote:
| this was my first Apple laptop. i even had an orinoco gold wifi
| pcmcia card, a pringles can, a bit of all-thread, and an antenna
| cable, and away my friend and i went on wardriving expeditions.
| back then, wifi wasn't nearly as established yet, and it was fun
| to a couple of knuckleheads to map out locations. if only we
| could have known how mapping would evolve.
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(page generated 2023-09-13 23:00 UTC)