I am very interested by what you say, because computers and especially laptops always have a dying CD-ROM drive, motherboard, hard-drive , screen.
Do you think I can get a clamshell ibook, or the '12 white , to work fine from browsing the web today? Can it have wifi? Can it run youtube?
On the first thing: Yes, computers break - as does everything, but in my not so humble experience, and looking past some well known debacles, computer hardware is far more resilient than you could expect by reading forums. I strongly feel that a lot privately told tales of "broken" devices are mainly stories which are presented in order to motivate buying the newest and finest. I've even resorted to this type of subterfuge myself sometimes...
If the hardware is handled with care, the breakdown percentage is quite tolerable. I have a friend who repairs iPhones for a living, and his experience is that over 95 % of iPhone failures are to be attributed to
users dropping their iPhones - either into liquid or a hard surface. Regarding older gear, the problem lies mainly in the (relatively) excessive price of having a proficient technician do his magic combined with the relatively low know-how and interest-level of common users. I used to consult with some companies in the graphics industry, and even the slightest hiccup could lead to out-of-warranty computers ending up in the "to be recycled" -heap. I think the "my car ran out of gas so I go a new one" -story has to be inspired with someone who had worked in IT...
The easiest 600 I ever made was with a DC G5, which had been given to me as "dead" and turned out to be a wobbly power connector on the logic board..
I've had (after 20+ years of daily intensive computer use) only one case in
which the computer was ruined due to a hardware fault - a dodgy PSU which fried the motherboard (and NIC+GPU). Otherwise the usual culprits are Hard drives (that's why you keep backups), fans (especially the smaller ones) and DVD drives (easily replaced...). Usually none of these are terminal as components are made to be exchanged...
That said, these types of component failures are not as typical as reading these forums would lead you to believe. I buy a lot of components nth-hand (for personal use), and besides some dodgy RAM (which I dug up from a one-euro discount bin), I have not suffered a broken component for at least four years.
Except my iPhone 4, I do not currently own a single piece of computing hardware which I had not bought used. I usually source my used gear locally, and avoid making trades with nameless sellers. I tend to sound out the seller, and am easily convinced by the life-story of the hardware. Likewise, I sell a lot of stuff forward and have not heard from anyone who would have complained that the gear would have broken.
As a rule of thumb you could say, that if the hardware is at least three years old (so that any built-in deficiencies have had the time to surface), and the seller has clearly not mistreated the gear, you're quite safe. So what if you buy an MDD and the superdrive breaks - get a new (or used) one.
For me the real sin is in all those people who don't bother to recycle their hardware and leave it standing in the rain besides the dumpster. My dream is that Apple (or some other hardware manufacturer) would finance the postage of sending broken or spent hardware for evaluation and selective recycling...
On the second point you raise,
People need to keep in mind, that the full "HD experience" is not what everyone uses their computers for. Most people who accept the idea of buying a computer X years old also accept that they should not expect to be able to do everything invented in those X years.
I regularly blow the dust off my late 2001 12" iBook (which does not differ from a clamshell iBook that much) and take it for a spin. I've upgraded the HDD (the old one was getting noisy, and I've maxed out the RAM (to a whopping 640 MB) and added an Airport card. It runs Tiger nicely. I use it whenever I would worry too much about my MBP (whenever I'm in dirty/dusty surroundings or where the risk of someone stealing it is heightened.) If I'm outside of WLAN coverage I use a 3G USB dongle, which works nicely on the iBook's USB 1.1. It handles office, basic internet and email without a hitch. I admit it's as old as my car, but I do not yet think of my car as an "old" car.
I admit there are a lot of things I *could* do on my MBP, which I cannot use the iBook for, but most of those things are such that I do not do them anyway, such as:
- Viewing HD video. Good movies are not made better by adding pixels or sound channels. The iBook plays DVD's nicely.
- Browsing youtube. Except a minuscule percentage, the stuff's not worth spending time on.
- Playing 3D-games. Quite honestly I feel 3D has been a mixed blessing for games...
- Flash-stuff. I've systematically uninstalled flash on all PPC machines and blocked (click-to'ed) Flash on all my Intel gear - I can't say I miss it, infact, the web is so much better once all that flash-content is bypassed...
- Video and 3D-crunching. But who would buy a 12-year old computer with that intent...
The only real gripe i have about the performance of the iBook is that there are starting to be some quite productivity -oriented sites which utilize javascript so intensely, that the machine slows to a crawl. Just today I tried to look up the inventory of a hardware store, and the experience was baaad...
One final note: PPC software-wise is a potential problem, especially as time progresses, but (assuming you can accept missing out on the latest and greatest) not yet. In fact, I still feel that the lack of PPC support past Snow Leopard (have not yet gone past SL, even sold a nice MBP which came with Lion) is a greater problem than the availability of PPC apps...
RGDS,
)
