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PowerBook G4 "Hard Shell" cases!!

R

Raymel

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 27, 2014
10
0
New England
Friends:

I recently stumbled across a Craigslist for sale ad for a 12"/1.5ghz/1.25GB/PowerBook G4/$90. Absolutely FLAWLESS condition. Not a scratch or dent and cosmetically. A very rare find. And, the battery had 17 cycles.

I have several Mac's (6) in the house which we use and I've never owned a PowerBook. I do have a PowerMac G5 but not a G4. I am no stranger to the limitations of the PPC processor and I brought it as a collectable. However, it's very functional (Facebook, YouTube, Office...) which I may use from time to time. For hours I searched for a hardshell case which felt almost impossible to find. At some point, I thought I was out of luck and believed none were made. However, rumor (in the MacRumor forum) was going around that "TechShell" (Florida based accessory store) that sold cases for the 12"/15" G4 back in the day.

I went to TechShell's website and e-mailed their Customer Service Dept. and I surprisingly received a response in a day or so. They have them in stock! I brought one through them directly which took about 2-3 days to arrive. Very smooth/professional transaction. Here's to all my PowerBook G4 (Aluminum) users who might have been looking as long as I have. I am not stuck on the color but I am happy I can now protect it from scratches and it has a nice rubbery feel to it as my other MacBook Pro cases have. Here's what I got for $30 bucks.

Thanks!


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That case is fantastic - very good idea protecting a flawless machine like that. There's not much point in me getting one though, my 12" G4 Powerbook is already covered in dents and scratches! :rolleyes:
 
Sounds like my old 12" PowerBook. The AASP I worked for routinely bought out large installations of iBooks, iMacs and PowerBooks as school systems upgraded to Intel Macs. They would go through, re-furbish several hundred of these and then sell them for considerably more. Well, it wasn't uncommon to find Macs that had had their boxes opened but had never been used.

When one of these parcels showed up around 2008 I spied a couple of 12" PowerBook boxes. Low and behold they were brand new, showing only 1-2 charge cycles, and were the last generation 1.5Ghz models. I was able to buy one for the same price that we had paid as part of the bulk purchase. Absolutely loved that little Mac.

With that said, I don't care for the hard shell cases. As an ex-technician I've removed dozens (hundreds?) of them while working on Macs. More often than not I'd find debris trapped between the aluminum/plastic of the Mac and the plastic of the case. The problem is as this stuff gets trapped, and the Mac is moved around, pressure is applied on the case in normal usage, etc the debris can cause lots of little scratches on the Mac.

I prefer using fleece lined sleeves to store my Mac notebooks. Beyond that I'm typically pretty confident that I won't end up with scratches/dents outside of a freak accident.

With that said, thats VERY cool that they were able to accommodate your request for a case! I understand why most companies drop support for items after a certain time period but it says a lot about a company when they continue to support enthusiasts 7-8 years later. Those are the businesses that I like to in turn support.
 
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