I’ve handled many clamshell iBooks and even more iBook G4s (far too many for the latter, to be honest… heck, I’m sitting on three working units and two parts donors for the G4s!).
The number of times I’ve handled or used an iBook G3 “ice” or “translucent” edition I can count on maybe one hand; the number of times I’ve seen one I could count on maybe two. I scarcely ever run across them, and I probably haven’t touched one since a 2003 Apple Store visit. The top case and lid have a pearlescent sheen to the plastic. You can sort of see it here, along the front edge nearest the camera:
This feature stands out to my eyes because there was no other Apple product from that period — or
any — which carried this peculiar look and feel. It didn’t resemble anything from the desktop line (the “Quicksilver” G4s came close, I suppose, though those are a bit darker grey), nor did it resemble the titanium in the PowerBook. I get a sense, though, Ive was striving for a metallic or metalloid effect to stiff-arm iBooks into looking more like the PowerBook than like the clamshell.
They seem to appear so infrequently — then or now — because many of the customers who loved the clamshell’s features (there were, obviously, many) were put off by this about-face, while clamshell detractors (i.e., bros at the time who whinged and hawed and bellyached at the purported “femininity” of the clamshell iBook) warmed somewhat to this series, but it still stood out (in a negative sense) because of that pearlescent sheen (also treated, in a sense, “feminine” — scare quotes deliberate, because
bish plz).
Once the iMac G4 came out in opaque white and the iBook soon followed with the same, I’d see iBooks showing up a lot more often everywhere — i.e., at coffee shops and libraries.
I
do have to make one correction to my previous post, though: there
were a few 800MHz models — the
32MB VRAM models of late 2002 — which came out in the ice/translucent finish.