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Possible PowerBook G5 discovered!

Anonymous Freak

Anonymous Freak

macrumors 603
Original poster
Dec 12, 2002
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Cascadia
Many Mac collectors may be familiar with the enthusiast haplain, mostly over at the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army.

Well, he seems to have gotten a hold of the Holy Grail of mythical Macs...

He still hasn't confirmed it yet (doesn't want to dismantle it sufficiently to prove it, and hasn't gotten it up and running yet,) but it has all the hallmarks of being an honest-to-goodness PowerBook G5.
 
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I am quite simply speechless. It all adds up - dates, codenames, power consumption. Haplain has done it again!
 
gavinstubbs09 said:
Looks like it has a MacBook Pro battery! The label on the top (if I read it correctly) says it's a 1.1Ghz. Might even be a early intel MBP.
Click to expand...

It's dated 2003 - WAAAY too early for a serious Intel portable. But quite within reason for a G5...

Apple switched to Intel when Intel's roadmap was clearly superior to IBM's. That didn't happen until 2004 at the earliest - in 2003 Intel was still balls-to-the-wall going after pure GHz, power-be-damned. The line that would become Core 2 Duo had *JUST* started (Pentium M) and was still "that low-power notebook chip" with *ZERO* plans for it to take over the desktop.

It wouldn't have made sense for Apple to mock up a full Intel notebook at that point - it was sufficient just to "keep the lights on".
 
Anonymous Freak said:
It's dated 2003 - WAAAY too early for a serious Intel portable. But quite within reason for a G5...

Apple switched to Intel when Intel's roadmap was clearly superior to IBM's. That didn't happen until 2004 at the earliest - in 2003 Intel was still balls-to-the-wall going after pure GHz, power-be-damned. The line that would become Core 2 Duo had *JUST* started (Pentium M) and was still "that low-power notebook chip" with *ZERO* plans for it to take over the desktop.

It wouldn't have made sense for Apple to mock up a full Intel notebook at that point - it was sufficient just to "keep the lights on".
Click to expand...
It's my understanding that Apple nixed a G5 PowerBook because of heat. The G4 processors at the time required a lot of design to minimize their heat and Jobs himself responded once to an email about how hot the laptops got, saying it was normal.

I don't deny that there may have been a G5 prototype, but if so, it was never more than that.

Well…except for this model anyway…
 

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  • powerbook_g5_mockup.jpg
    powerbook_g5_mockup.jpg
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Yeah the g5 was a for sure power hungry beast I also remember countless nights with the ol PowerBook lifting it up off my burning legs and steadily gauging my temps with the use of a fan program I can't remember the name but I had it for free then did a fresh install of 10.5 and lost it then after that I was stuck with one that I had to set it within seconds because it would slide off the side of the screen (someone will know what I'm talkin about) I would like to get my hands on something like that since I've become somewhat of a collector.
 
Yes...watching the keynote for the original MBP, Jobs said Apple tried and tried to see if there was any way possible to fit a G5 in a notebook computer, but all in vain because of the heat and power consumption.
 
There were almost definitely prototypes in various forms. It's just that none have ever escaped into the wild. From preliminary inspection of the markings and device, this looks like it could actually be the first to escape Cupertino (or more likely, mandated archival/destruction). I will ask some of my friends who currently work in Apple's laptop engineering divisions about this.
 
W.O.W. My jaw just dropped after reading that forum thread.
Aparently it was recently found that it uses the S3Lite Southbridge used in iMac G5's and late 2004 Single 1.8 PowerMac G5's. (Low Power Chipset version).

EVERYTHING adds up. This guy is crazy lucky. I'm so jelly. :)
 
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Damn. It's a dualie G4, not a G5.

Big shame, but still awesome! Imagine dual-core PowerBook G4's knocking around!

Going along the lines of what the guys on the other forum have said - it looks highly likely that it was an early tester 'plan-b' attempt, mocked up after giving up on a G5 variant.

ie. ''a G5 can never work, so let's have a go at cramming a dual-core low power version of the G4 in & see where that takes us.''
 
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Anonymous Freak said:
Many Mac collectors may be familiar with the enthusiast haplain, mostly over at the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army.

Well, he seems to have gotten a hold of the Holy Grail of mythical Macs...

He still hasn't confirmed it yet (doesn't want to dismantle it sufficiently to prove it, and hasn't gotten it up and running yet,) but it has all the hallmarks of being an honest-to-goodness PowerBook G5.
Click to expand...

What? How did he even get one, didn't even know apple even worked on one?
 
Intelligent said:
What? How did he even get one, didn't even know apple even worked on one?
Click to expand...

As has been said both in the linked thread and here, while Apple did work on a PowerBook G5 prototype (many references have been found, but nobody has publicly released any images of it,) this specific device turned out to be a "plan B" dual-CPU G4 PowerBook prototype, apparently built in the shell of what had been a PowerBook G5. (and if you follow the link, you'll see that the shell isn't much to look at. It's not a "prettified Apple design", it's a pure utilitarian box of a shell to simply hold the innards together for basic testing.)
 
Anonymous Freak said:
Many Mac collectors may be familiar with the enthusiast haplain, mostly over at the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army.

Well, he seems to have gotten a hold of the Holy Grail of mythical Macs...

He still hasn't confirmed it yet (doesn't want to dismantle it sufficiently to prove it, and hasn't gotten it up and running yet,) but it has all the hallmarks of being an honest-to-goodness PowerBook G5.
Click to expand...

The link is dead. Has anyone saved what has been there?

P. S. OMG I want PowerBook G5!
 
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B S Magnet said:
This purports to be a photo derived from that long-gone thread:

A_PowerBook_G5_prototype_in_the_PROTO2_stage..jpg

[source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_PowerBook_G5_prototype_in_the_PROTO2_stage..jpg ]
Click to expand...

Now that I’ve looked around a little more closely, I have doubts that the above prototype is a G5, but rather, a dual-G4 15-inch model (PowerBook5,8). I’m basing this on a post with photos of a dual-G4 PowerBook which appears to be identical to the above picture.

But what is fascinating about the dual G4 and another 17-inch PowerBook G4 prototype from March 2004 (at a much later stage in the prototyping production stream) is the existence of a never-used power cable for PowerBooks which resembles a kind of hybrid between a MagSafe adapter (i.e., the embedded charging LED) and a A1105 Mac mini power cable:

05.jpg


Capture-d%E2%80%99%C3%A9cran-2013-03-31-%C3%A0-13.36.29.png
 
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B S Magnet said:
Now that I’ve looked around a little more closely, I have doubts that the above prototype is a G5, but rather, a dual-G4 15-inch model (PowerBook5,8). I’m basing this on a post with photos of a dual-G4 PowerBook which appears to be identical to the above picture.

But what is fascinating about the dual G4 and another 17-inch PowerBook G4 prototype from March 2004 (at a much later stage in the prototyping production stream) is the existence of a never-used power cable for PowerBooks which resembles a kind of hybrid between a MagSafe adapter (i.e., the embedded charging LED) and a A1105 Mac mini power cable:

05.jpg


Capture-d%E2%80%99%C3%A9cran-2013-03-31-%C3%A0-13.36.29.png
Click to expand...

Would be awesome to have at least a dual G4 book actually.

I am still considering whether to buy a PowerBook, one of the later versions, but thinking of compiling gcc from source on a single G4 makes me scared LOL
Even on G5 Quad it is not a quick thing. And I am unsure I can just compile everything on Quad and stick it into G4.

P. S. Many thanks for the refs!
 
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barracuda156 said:
Would be awesome to have at least a dual G4 book actually.

I am still considering whether to buy a PowerBook, one of the later versions, but thinking of compiling gcc from source on a single G4 makes me scared LOL
Even on G5 Quad it is not a quick thing. And I am unsure I can just compile everything on Quad and stick it into G4.

P. S. Many thanks for the refs!
Click to expand...
On my Mac Mini G4 1.42GHz (single G4) compiling GCC 6/7 from scratch takes multiple days.
 
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