How long will my 12" Aluminimum Powerbook G4 last?!

depends.
my girlfriend's ibook G4 12' (last rev) is starting to chug when doing much more than word processing and light web surfing.
your powerbook has a bit more RAM/processing power than that....

but,it all depends on what you're doing with it.

so, you tell us.


(if you want to unload the powerbook to fund the new macbook, PM me.)

No one can say for sure, but I'd go with a really damn long time bearing in mind that the drive may need to be replaced along the way. Over time the screen will being to dim a little.

PS. last year I gifted a 500mhz iBook to a friend and it was running like a champ.

The final version of the 12" PowerBook came out in January 2005, so yours should not be even four years old yet. I'm still using a first generation 12" PowerBook which is now over five years old. The screen has dimmed a bit, but otherwise it works fine for such an old laptop. I haven't even replaced the battery.

I have a 1.33 Ghz 15" PowerBook G4 that has lasted for well over four years. Aside from a catastrophic hard drive failure last year, it's been great. (I swapped the standard 60 GB one for a 150 GB drive and all has been well since.)

My very first Mac - a Mac Classic with all of 2 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive - still fires up and works fine. And I bought that piece of beige excellence back in '91 when I was heading off to college.

I'd hold on to that 12" lappy and refurb it as necessary. It's a desirable and still attractive little netbook.

Once you get the MacBook you will be stressing your PB a lot less so it will last even longer. I have a Duo and Powerbook 2400c that I still use.

i was using for the last 4 months a 12"powerbook, the very last revision with 1.5Gb of ram and it worked good with leopard.

However, I was unable to run Aperture on it, and I managed to get it to run by editing the program to do so, but its performance was low when dealing with big photo files and that was my biggest reason to change to the new macbook.

For general purpose, the powerbook was more than ok, however I was a bit unhappy by its flash performance and see youtube videos a bit frozen on their playback, aside for that, it was still very usable.

I had it with Leopard on it, yet I read that such systems would perform better with Tiger.

I dont know how much it is going to last, but apple's program slowly are ditching such processors, some program from ilife wont install on it, aperture wont install on it either, unless you edit them.

And as far as I know Snow Leopard wont support the powerpc architecture, so maybe Leopard will be the farther it can go.

They may support it before it's all over.

My 15" PowerBook just turned five two months ago (Sept 30th), it's still an amazing machine and is running just like the day I bought it. There are many PowerBooks that are 8 and still running, yours will last a long time.

I recently upgraded from a 1.33GHz 12" Powerbook to a black MacBook (refurb, last revision). My PB lasted me 3 years, 8 months. Everything was still working but I wanted a faster system - Illustrator and Keynote were getting slow, some compressed videos were playing choppily.