sorry to say, but that has been my experience as well. the 12" 1.33 were more or less bullet proof, and every 14" 1.42 i've ever been around has had a few to several problems. strange enough has been that i've not seen one thing be the problem, it's always different, or a different combo of problems. my background is supporting laptops from the g3 powerbooks on, i've had hundreds of 12" ibooks g3 and g4 that have gone to college with a recent high school grad, completed an undergrad degree, then been given to a younger sib or relative who went and also did an undergrad degree. the things last forever or until the graphic/chip freeze of death shows up. g3 800 holds the record for smartest system i've seen... undergrad, then associates, then undergrad and masters program, was on the third undergrad degree when it died... poor old thing was looking pretty worse for wear by that point!
anyway. best of luck, keep the good parts, send the rest on their way. if you need ibook parts, let me know, i've still got bins of stuff about. last supported system finally went away last year, now i've nothing to do but figure out where to hide all the leftovers. 😱 best of luck.
Well that sucks that you noticed a trend in the 14" models. I thought that I was upgrading from my 12" 1.33GHz 1.5GB RAM G4 (that had everything working still perfectly)
The 900MHz one that I have seems to be doing fine, but the fact that it can't run Leopard is an issue. It's not a huge issue, but I really like 10.5 and the extra WiFi capabilities that come with the OS. I know that I can connect to WPA and WEP, but now extra WiFi adapters won't work the way that I want them to or at all and I'll be stuck with a slow connection or basically have a small desktop when it's attached to ethernet.
Do you have any experience with ethernet splitters? That way, I can have them both connected to the same ethernet homeplug that my iMac is currently using. I figured that since the homeplug is rated at up to 100Mbs, that it could handle having both machines connected at the same time and still provide the same speed.
And yes, I would love parts but since I am attached to PC Macs for both experience and financial reasons, I can't even afford shipping costs for anything. It's times like this where I wish I didn't have to sell my 20" Intel iMac(1 year ago) or my PMG5 quad(6 months ago).
And I still love your signature line.
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I have a 1.33 Ghz 12 inch, and it's been going strong for some time now. I bought it mostly as a school computer, as I didn't really think PPC could do much. Now I realized it can still do almost everything a modern Mac or PC can do, just perhaps at a lower speed, and using older applications. The rest of the world are poor saps, they just let their PPC machines collect dust. They are really good still today, and I'm sorry to see that loss.
Yeah, I had that same model and it worked perfectly. I even used it as my media hub to stream my iTunes library to my AppleTV and it worked just as well as my previous/more powerful machines.
I agree that people do not give their PPC Macs enough credit for how capable they are and how advanced they were at the time to the extent that they have almost kept up with the demands of technological advancement.
I think I will be getting a new machine at some point, but my "requirements" of a higher capacity HDD so that I don't have to have too many peripherals attached.
My current machine (iMac G5 1.8GHz 2 GB RAM and 320GB HDD) is great, but without bluetooth or Airport or a larger HDD, I am using all of the I/O ports and I don't like it.
I want to find a good iMac that was released before the ultra thin models without the optical drive were released.