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iBook Clamshell SE: Was that a joke or something?

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rjcalifornia

rjcalifornia

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 4, 2012
668
7
El Salvador
I was looking at the clamshell specs and I was wondering if that was some sort of joke. A 800x600 screen and a pitty HDD for almost USD $2000?

I remember having a shiny Wintel laptop with a 1024x768 screen resolution, big hard drive, two times faster and cheaper...
 
No joke. How much is the Wintel laptop worth now? How much is the iBook worth now? People wanted those because they ran Mac OS, looked cool, possibly had a DVD player, and because they saw a commercial for it.
 
Intell said:
No joke. How much is the Wintel laptop worth now? How much is the iBook worth now? People wanted those because they ran Mac OS, looked cool, possibly had a DVD player, and because they saw a commercial for it.
Click to expand...

It is not that I have something against it, it is just it doesn't look cool, it was/is underpowered and it had the worst screen resolution ever. Mine had DVD player, 1.6 Ghz... just saying that for a 'it just works' product, it looks way too underpowered...
 
At the time, they looked eyeshocking. Some people loved them. In 2000, the fastest clocked mobile CPU was about 800Mhz, not 1.6Ghz. Don't forget about the megahertz myth as well.
 
Intell said:
At the time, they looked eyeshocking. Some people loved them. In 2000, the fastest clocked mobile CPU was about 800Mhz, not 1.6Ghz. Don't forget about the megahertz myth as well.
Click to expand...

2000? I thought they were around in 2001. Mine was 1.6 Ghz
 
In 2000 my machine at work was G3 beige 300 MHz. It ran OS 9 perfectly and was driving 2 professional scanners: Chromagraph and Topaz.
In 1999 my employer bought first G4 units: Yikes and Sawtooth. All exclusively for OS 9. Nobody was thinking seriously about OS X as work environment for pre-press, not yet.
All of these were nowhere near underpowered, especially for work they were doing.
Clamshells do run OS 9 perfectly, this hasn't changed even today.
Your shiny Wintel laptop most likely bites the dust now ;)
 
It was meant as a device you could easily take to work and school and not have to worry about it running out of battery. And it was decently sized, and was not something you had to throw in a bag as it had the handle. People used to use Photoshop on it at school with no issue.

By the time it was discontinued, Windows XP wasn't even out.
 
Jessica Lares said:
It was meant as a device you could easily take to work and school and not have to worry about it running out of battery. And it was decently sized, and was not something you had to throw in a bag as it had the handle. People used to use Photoshop on it at school with no issue.

By the time it was discontinued, Windows XP wasn't even out.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but when the 500 mhz ibook came out, we already have over 1 Ghz...

I'm just kinda wondering why those ibooks were so underpowered?
 
rjcalifornia said:
Yeah, but when the 500 mhz ibook came out, we already have over 1 Ghz...
Click to expand...

Yeah, and I remember the mess Intel got into with the Pentium4's: A lot of megahertzes but no oomph.

Listen, I'm not saying that Apple was not in a bind with the PPC processors - the "AIM alliance" really had trouble getting them fast - but a megahertz is not a precise measure and it also matters what you do with it.

RGDS,
 
I personally never liked the Clamshell iBooks, but I don't recall much talk about them being underpowered. I was using a Wall Street PowerBook and an iMac at the time. But I do recall that they were very popular and sold well.

There was an endless stream of commentary among tech writers around matching MHz between PowerPC and Intel, with Apple often outdoing Windows PCs based on how each chip managed their given OS and popular applications for each platform.

OS 9 was far from perfect, but Apple was good at designing hardware to meet the software requirements of OS 9.
 
seveej said:
Yeah, and I remember the mess Intel got into with the Pentium4's: A lot of megahertzes but no oomph.

Listen, I'm not saying that Apple was not in a bind with the PPC processors - the "AIM alliance" really had trouble getting them fast - but a megahertz is not a precise measure and it also matters what you do with it.

RGDS,
Click to expand...

I learned last summer that Mhz don't really matter when I was using this machine as my main do it all any time any day mac

400mhz g4 sawtooth
1.5 gigs of ram
radeon 7000 32mb video card
20 gig boot drive
160 gb slave drive

and this was driving a 19 inch lcd and I was quite content
 
Ghz Do Matter, a lot. A 500 Mhz ibook G3 can't do anything against a 1.6 Ghz from that time. I know that.

666sheep said:
In 2000 my machine at work was G3 beige 300 MHz. It ran OS 9 perfectly and was driving 2 professional scanners: Chromagraph and Topaz.
In 1999 my employer bought first G4 units: Yikes and Sawtooth. All exclusively for OS 9. Nobody was thinking seriously about OS X as work environment for pre-press, not yet.
All of these were nowhere near underpowered, especially for work they were doing.
Clamshells do run OS 9 perfectly, this hasn't changed even today.
Your shiny Wintel laptop most likely bites the dust now ;)
Click to expand...

Not so fast! I donated it to a school few years ago. It is still there, working like back in the day, and very useful.
 
rjcalifornia said:
Yeah, but when the 500 mhz ibook came out, we already have over 1 Ghz...

I'm just kinda wondering why those ibooks were so underpowered?
Click to expand...

Did you read Intell's post? The Megahertz Myth?

----------
rjcalifornia said:
Ghz Do Matter, a lot. A 500 Mhz ibook G3 can't do anything against a 1.6 Ghz from that time. I know that.



Not so fast! I donated it to a school few years ago. It is still there, working like back in the day, and very useful.
Click to expand...

It's like talking to a brick wall...
 
seveej said:
One more try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth

RGDS,
Click to expand...

Yeah because Wikipedia is a trusted source of information and no one can modify it...:cool:


I get your point, I'm not closed minded. But when I was in college I got an ibook G3 and someone gave me a wintel laptop from that time, and the wintel was faster in so many ways.

I love my G4, it is just sometimes I feel the G3 felt underpowered compared to some laptops from that time. The G4 feels pretty fast even today :D
 
rjcalifornia said:
Yeah because Wikipedia is a trusted source of information and no one can modify it...
Click to expand...

While anyone can edit Wikipedia, rarely do the edits of IP's or newbie editors stay for more than a few hours unless they are backed up with citations. Wikipedia has many automated bots and other people whose entire job is to go through it and correct incorrect information. Wikipedia isn't as bad as people make it out as being or what it once was.
 
rjcalifornia said:
Yeah because Wikipedia is a trusted source of information and no one can modify it...:cool:


I get your point, I'm not closed minded. But when I was in college I got an ibook G3 and someone gave me a wintel laptop from that time, and the wintel was faster in so many ways.

I love my G4, it is just sometimes I feel the G3 felt underpowered compared to some laptops from that time. The G4 feels pretty fast even today :D
Click to expand...

Ok give me 8mins and watch this and let Steve show you the error of the belief of more Ghz the faster the machine: http://youtu.be/PKF9GOE2q38

Remember seeing is believing

Now tell me that wintel is faster from the same time as PPC was.

Edit: and if that's not early enough here is Phil from 1999 to show you how a G3 powerbook is faster than a intel P3 desktop http://youtu.be/wE5717f_5Rk the launch of the clamshell: http://youtu.be/cdpRSj7tLiY and finally the launch of the new iBook from Steve comparing it to the competition: http://youtu.be/6MFUStxScfE
 
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rjcalifornia said:
Yeah because Wikipedia is a trusted source of information and no one can modify it...:cool:


I get your point, I'm not closed minded. But when I was in college I got an ibook G3 and someone gave me a wintel laptop from that time, and the wintel was faster in so many ways.

I love my G4, it is just sometimes I feel the G3 felt underpowered compared to some laptops from that time. The G4 feels pretty fast even today :D
Click to expand...


Apple showed the Megahertz Myth to be reality on stage during product introductions at the time. That was backed up not only by the press doing more in depth reviews and actual usage by owners. The PPC chips were far better than their Pentium and Celeron competitors of the day, which is one of the reasons there are still so many of us who love the old PPC machines. To a non-Apple user at the time they look like dated technology, but they are still very capable machines going on 8 years after the last PPC Mac was sold.

And btw, if Ghz are all that matter why have all of the chip companies stopped trying to simply increase their CPU speed? They finally learned what Apple knew years ago, cache/pipes is more important to speed than CPU clock speed. If you haven't noticed, Intel stopped promoting the speed of their CPU's years ago and now don't even refer to the clock speed in their advertising. It's all Core i7 blah blah blah, but no mention of clock speed. They work on making the chips talk to the motherboard faster through higher cache instead of worrying about irrelevant clock speed.

I have a 400 Mhz Gigabit Ethernet G4 Power Mac that is still fast enough to do everything today but stream video. That's a 14 year old computer.

This same Megahertz Myth argument pops up on here from time to time and it's always people who were Windows users at the time who think the Macs of the day were slow, however they never used a Mac back then to actually know better.
 
Just get two machines and benchmark them. Getting those machines to run same versions of benchmark software might be hard, but that's the way to find out. There was a thread some time ago where we benchmarked my iBook G4 against couple PC's and atleast there an Apple machine from 2005 was thrashed by a budget PC (Celeron processor) from 2004, both running around 1.3GHz. However, from what I have read, G3 was a good processor in its time while G4 evolved slowly and was not that different from G3 except for the AltiVec engine it had. So G3 probably does fare better when compared against Intel/AMD offerings from the same era. G4 lost all test against Celeron M Banias.
 
Intell said:
At the time, they looked eyeshocking. Some people loved them. In 2000, the fastest clocked mobile CPU was about 800Mhz, not 1.6Ghz. Don't forget about the megahertz myth as well.
Click to expand...

I agree with you! I still believe that they are one of the most interesting looking systems Apple ever made. I really enjoyed using mine. They were also pretty durable.
 
rjcalifornia said:
Ghz Do Matter, a lot. A 500 Mhz ibook G3 can't do anything against a 1.6 Ghz from that time. I know that.
Click to expand...

There were no 1.6 ghz machines at the time the clamshell iBook was released. Fastest Intel laptop processor at the time, according to Wikipedia, was 850 mhz, and that would be a competitor to the Powerbook, not the iBook.
 
Clamshells were pretty much marketed towards young people, not insurance agents.

I too, think they look cool. Think different? Go ahead and look different.

That said, back then, my family had a Wallstreet. 233mhz + 512 mb ram and it did everything I could ask of it.
 
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