iBook G4 upgrade:

jrsx · Nov 23, 2013

So I have a 1.33 mhz iBook g4 running OS 10.4.11 Tiger, and I was looking into installing Leopard on the machine. It only has 512 MBs, so it might be wise to upgrade that, too. But my question is, Ebay is very expensive for Leopard, and I did a little searching, and I found this site (LINK REMOVED). I believe it is a download, so is it legal? If so, is it a good choice to download it, or would it be better to get DVD installation media? Thanks

Zotaccian · Nov 23, 2013

As far as I know Leopard was never offered as download by any official, genuine sources.

EDIT: And also prices for some software seem to be bit too good to be true (genuine).

tom vilsack · Nov 23, 2013

-your gonna trust that site with your visa number?

-try placing a ad in your local craigslist asking for leopard

-I have pretty much same ibook (1.2GHz,512mb ram) leopard ran okay,but went back to tiger as I found my ibook would run 5+c cooler under tiger.

California · Nov 23, 2013

jrsx said:
So I have a 1.33 mhz iBook g4 running OS 10.4.11 Tiger, and I was looking into installing Leopard on the machine. It only has 512 MBs, so it might be wise to upgrade that, too. But my question is, Ebay is very expensive for Leopard, and I did a little searching, and I found this site. I believe it is a download, so is it legal? If so, is it a good choice to download it, or would it be better to get DVD installation media? Thanks

I have a 80gig hard drive with full Leopard on it. Probably an upgrade for you on the HD as well. PM me

eyoungren · Nov 23, 2013

Right now at work I'm running 10.5.8 on a G4/450 AGP with 256mb of ram. Works pretty good.

Hrududu · Nov 23, 2013

eyoungren said:
Right now at work I'm running 10.5.8 on a G4/450 AGP with 256mb of ram. Works pretty good.

By pretty good you mean it's capable of booting? I've got it on my 500MHz Cube with 1.5GB and it is NOT a pleasant experience. I've run Leopard on just about everything, and I can say that I personally think 1.25GHz and 1.5GB of RAM is about as slow as I'd want to have to use on a daily basis. Can the slower Macs run it? Sure, but more as novelty than actually useful.

eyoungren · Nov 23, 2013

Hrududu said:
By pretty good you mean it's capable of booting? I've got it on my 500MHz Cube with 1.5GB and it is NOT a pleasant experience. I've run Leopard on just about everything, and I can say that I personally think 1.25GHz and 1.5GB of RAM is about as slow as I'd want to have to use on a daily basis. Can the slower Macs run it? Sure, but more as novelty than actually useful.

Yes, booting. It's also running Chicken of the VNC so it can see the desktop of the G4 right next to it. And it's the print server so my Intel Mac can print to the Applescript printers.

I'm not taxing it, and it had 1.75GB up until last week. But Leopard will run fine on a 1GB machine. I've had it on a TiBook 400 and my son runs it just fine on his 1Ghz TiBook DVI.

This particular Mac at work was on Leopard running Adobe CS 4, Office 2008, Acrobat 9 Professional, Suitcase Fusuion 2 and QuarkXPress 8.5.1 absolutely fine. A bit slower yes, but acceptable.

jrsx · Nov 23, 2013

Yeah, I figured it wouldn't be as good as it looked. I just ran into it while shopping. I guess Ebay might be my best bet, Amazon's sellers are simply awful for Leopard. Another question: how does Leopard affect CPU and Graphics usage? Will it run reasonably with 512 MBs of Ram, or shall I just spend the money to upgrade that sometime, as well?

iBook G4 (A1133), 1.33 GHZ, 512 MBs of RAM, CD-RW drive

Intell · Nov 24, 2013

Leopard will run on that machine, but with only 512MB of ram is won't be at it's best. Leopard likes at least 1GB. I don't think that machine has CoreImage (could be wrong about that), that may slow it down a tiny bit. The CPU speed is a good speed for running Leopard with and it should handle it well.

Altemose · Nov 24, 2013

The only time Leopard was offered as a download was for Apple Developers. If you have the Mac Developer Program I believe you have access to all operating system versions. However, since you are buying disks, make sure it is a retail disk and not a restore disk. Even disks varied amongst versions of the same model.

:apple:

Altemose

RedCroissant · Nov 25, 2013

jrsx said:
Yeah, I figured it wouldn't be as good as it looked. I just ran into it while shopping. I guess Ebay might be my best bet, Amazon's sellers are simply awful for Leopard. Another question: how does Leopard affect CPU and Graphics usage? Will it run reasonably with 512 MBs of Ram, or shall I just spend the money to upgrade that sometime, as well?

iBook G4 (A1133), 1.33 GHZ, 512 MBs of RAM, CD-RW drive

Definitely upgrade the RAM. My former 12" G4 1.33GHz 1.5GB RAM iBook ran leopard wonderfully, so don't worry about that.

The most important thing to remember when buying Leopard for any PPC Machine is this: Not a single PPC Mac ever shipped with Leopard on it. This means that you should limit your search and purchase of Leopard to the 10.5.1 retail disc. It will save you a lot of money over the fully updated disc out there and you can download the update from Apple and store the .dmg on an external drive or make your own upgrade disc from it. And if you can't find the 10.5.8 combo update there, let me know and I can make sure that you get it.

jrsx · Nov 25, 2013

Altemose said:
The only time Leopard was offered as a download was for Apple Developers. If you have the Mac Developer Program I believe you have access to all operating system versions. However, since you are buying disks, make sure it is a retail disk and not a restore disk. Even disks varied amongst versions of the same model.

Altemose

Hold on-only for Apple developers? I have a friend that helped work on things like Xcode for Apple, and he has a developer account-would it be possible for me to get it that way, or would it be kinda cheap since I'm not using it for developing or anything? Also, Leopard is getting to be very scarce, as the last Powerpc users want their hands on it fast. Thus the large price, and I doubt anyone is going to pay $80 for Leopard just to sell an iBook to someone on ebay. Do people mostly get it off of TPB? I know that's terribly illegal... Check ebay out: almost all the PPC macs you see that are being sold are advertised as "having had fresh install of Leopard" or "OSX Leopard installed". Its crazy, seeing how expensive Leopard is getting, yet these all have Leopard....
Thanks for all the replies!

iBook G4 12 inch (A1133), 1.33 GHZ, 40 GB HDD, 512 MB RAM, CD-RW drive.

Intell · Nov 25, 2013

jrsx said:
Hold on-only for Apple developers? I have a friend that helped work on things like Xcode for Apple, and he has a developer account-would it be possible for me to get it that way, or would it be kinda cheap since I'm not using it for developing or anything? Also, Leopard is getting to be very scarce, as the last Powerpc users want their hands on it fast. Thus the large price, and I doubt anyone is going to pay $80 for Leopard just to sell an iBook to someone on ebay. Do people mostly get it off of TPB? I know that's terribly illegal... Check ebay out: almost all the PPC macs you see that are being sold are advertised as "having had fresh install of Leopard" or "OSX Leopard installed". Its crazy, seeing how expensive Leopard is getting, yet these all have Leopard....
Thanks for all the replies!

iBook G4 12 inch (A1133), 1.33 GHZ, 40 GB HDD, 512 MB RAM, CD-RW drive.

You can't get past versions of Mac OS X through the developer portal. You can only get the beta versions of the current version of Mac OS X.

RedCroissant · Nov 25, 2013

jrsx said:
Hold on-only for Apple developers? I have a friend that helped work on things like Xcode for Apple, and he has a developer account-would it be possible for me to get it that way, or would it be kinda cheap since I'm not using it for developing or anything? Also, Leopard is getting to be very scarce, as the last Powerpc users want their hands on it fast. Thus the large price, and I doubt anyone is going to pay $80 for Leopard just to sell an iBook to someone on ebay. Do people mostly get it off of TPB? I know that's terribly illegal... Check ebay out: almost all the PPC macs you see that are being sold are advertised as "having had fresh install of Leopard" or "OSX Leopard installed". Its crazy, seeing how expensive Leopard is getting, yet these all have Leopard....
Thanks for all the replies!

iBook G4 12 inch (A1133), 1.33 GHZ, 40 GB HDD, 512 MB RAM, CD-RW drive.

What I think is crazy is the price for the Leopard discs out there! I must have lucked out then because I got my family pack of 10.5.1 for $80! And I am only going to let go of it when PPC is truly dead. Or I won't since my PPC iMacs and iBooks work awesomely and they can easily stream to my AppleTV(pretty awesome for a 9 year old machine).

jrsx · Nov 25, 2013

Intell said:
You can't get past versions of Mac OS X through the developer portal. You can only get the beta versions of the current version of Mac OS X.

That's really weird because last week he was downloading Tiger from the porthole to extract something he thought he would need.....And Tiger is from 2005!!!

jrsx · Nov 25, 2013

So I'm guessing that I should purchase Leopard off of Ebay and be willing to spend $70+, then. Thanks for all the help, guys!

Intell · Nov 25, 2013

Call up Apple first. You may still be able to get it from them for free or at a cheaper price than eBay.

jrsx · Nov 25, 2013

Do they still have Leopard? I thought the oldest they had was Snow Leopard, which is Intel only.

gooser · Nov 26, 2013

let's get down to basics. why do you want leopard in the first place? it's not cheap plus you will have to add memory and that costs also. in my opinion i think the cost of leopard discs is fair since for every one for sale there are two people that want it.

Intell · Nov 26, 2013

jrsx said:
Do they still have Leopard? I thought the oldest they had was Snow Leopard, which is Intel only.

Thy still have it, but not on their site. They may still have Tiger and Panther in stock as well.

jrsx · Nov 26, 2013

Intell said:
Thy still have it, but not on their site. They may still have Tiger and Panther in stock as well.

Hmmmm. I'll have to check it out! Thanks for the info!

jrsx · Nov 26, 2013

Ok, silly me. I realized that the iBook's RAM was misinstalled, and I put in my other RAM stick and made sure it was in all the way, and it turned out to be a 1 GB stick! So now I do have the max of 1.5 GB (yes, the RAM was meant for this computer)!

Altemose · Nov 28, 2013

I have been told by numerous people that the Mac Developer Program offers past OS downloads. If you call AppleCare, explain the situation they can ship you disks for under 30$. They are generally machine specific however. They quoted $22 for Leopard 10.5.6 for my PowerMac G5. Give it a shot. For your sanity, don't pirate the disk. Many disks are ripped images of restore disk which "may" work, however usually have problems.

:apple:

Altemose

jrsx · Nov 28, 2013

I think a lot of G4 and G5 owners pirate disks, so I had to be careful when shopping on ebay to make sure I didn't get a computer with Leopard illegally installed on it.

spyguy10709 · Nov 28, 2013

Intell said:
You can't get past versions of Mac OS X through the developer portal. You can only get the beta versions of the current version of Mac OS X.

Intell, I'm going to violate my NDA simply because I can't stand how you're an "authority voice" around here, yet rarely know much about what you're saying - the Dev Connection lets you download old versions of OSX all the way back to Panther.

To the eventual Mod that reads this - I'm not "being mean" or "abusing forum members". I'm helping the other members of the forum get the correct information.

iBook G4 upgrade:

macrumors 65816

macrumors 6502a

macrumors 68000

macrumors 68040

macrumors Penryn

macrumors 68020

macrumors Penryn

macrumors 65816

macrumors P6

macrumors G3

Suspended

macrumors 65816

macrumors P6

Suspended

macrumors 65816

macrumors 65816

macrumors P6

macrumors 65816

macrumors 6502a

macrumors P6

macrumors 65816

macrumors 65816

macrumors G3

macrumors 65816

macrumors 65816

Attachments

Our Staff