Maybe it is possible

It's not THAT amazing

If you read through the whole thing it's for OS 9 only so far, and your system can't sleep and the brightness/volume controls on the keyboard don't work/are inverted and you can't get full brightness.

To me, this little "hack" doesn't seem worth it just to add a second CRT. This is only helpful if you have to do some serious work in ProTools on your iBook or something.

 

I think it's pretty cool to have the option though. If you really want sleep and the other stuff, you can always re-image OS 9...
When I replace my iBook (eventually) with a newer notebook, I might give this a try and set it up for just internet or something..

 

wow

i've been annoyed by a lot of apple's tactics lately, but this one really gets me! why would they cripple the functionality of their harware only to further separate consumer and pro???

apple hardware already looks crippled compared to pc stuff so why not show off every feature the ibook has?

i bought a "used" powerbook g3 4 months ago because i absolutely needed the dual screen (non-mirrored) support... i would have bought a "new" ibook if apple didn't hide/cripple features like this. the powerbook g4 was just way out of my price range.

 

Re: wow

Well, if the iBook could do everything the TiBook could do, I think a lot fewer people would buy the TiBook. It's hard enough for people to decide which to buy already. Apple doesn't want people buying the iBook if there's any chance they will go for the more expensive, higher-margin TiBook instead.

This is not the only example of Apple building artificial limitations into its hardware/software in order to make it easier for customers to distinguish between high end and low end. The low end rev A and rev B TiBooks (400 and 550MHz) could both be "overclocked" to the same speeds as their more expensive siblings with just a simple soldering job. I put "overclocked" in quotes because I don't think it even qualifies as overclocking - the "overclocked" CPU runs totally stable and the overclocked TiBook is distinguishable from the legitimately higher-clocked TiBook only by its serial number.

The 700MHz iBook can be "overclocked" to 800MHz in software. Is it really being overclocked? Perhaps, but the actual 800MHz version of the Sahara G3 has to cost only a few dollars more, so if Apple wanted a "real" 800MHz chip in the iBook, there's no reason they couldn't have it. Heck, there's no reason they couldn't use a 1GHz chip. They just don't want to hurt sales of the higher-margin 667MHz TiBook.

I will be interested to see this iBook hack implemented in OS X - it would probably be easier and less messy to implement than in OS 9. I just hope Apple doesn't become too vigilant about locking down its low end stuff down more tightly in the future in response to this.

Alex