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Ugliest PowerPC Mac?
- Thread starter timidpimpin
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I always thought the 14" iBook looked clunky compared to the 12" model, which was a perfect design. Come to think of it, why did Apple even build the 14" model? The specs only barely stretched past those of the 12". There were no added features, expansion options or higher resolutions... It just seemed like an unnecessary design.
I wonder which size was more successful in terms of sales...
I wonder which size was more successful in terms of sales...
Raising the dead on a dead thread about ugly PPC design:
Sorry, but hard, hard disagree on dissing the clamshell iBook — though I was never terribly fond of blueberry or graphite.
Had it not been for all the misogynist-inflected machismo at the time which winced and threw shade at the clamshell's lines as """feminine""" (its form and function are, plainly put, extremely smart, even if the final product was fairly heavy overall), it's clear from inspecting its logic board that there were were provisional plans for a Rev D. series, with somewhere between 128 and 256mb onboard memory and up to a 600MHz G3 PPC750cx processor (which would show up in the summer 2001 iMacs).
I gather these steady refinements would have been better for product reputation in the near-term, without all the problems which besieged the ice/dual-USB replacement, but it would have detracted from the implementation of a rectangular box (which would probably have come to pass regardless). Had a Rev D. clamshell come to fruition, I reckon there may have been a "Snow" version (with silicone-warm-white-on-polycarbonate-white); the Indigo version may have continued on with an SE; and a third, unique hue (another Apple online store exclusive) which probably never saw light of day with any Apple product (I daresay something like "Canary" or "Lemon").
Definitely the most difficult for me to look at/easiest to look away from:
1) the Quicksilver and MDD G4s*,
2) the eMac,
3) the Flower Power/Blue Dalmatian iMac G3s,
4) (this one may unsettle its fans) the first iMac G4s (which reminded me of something from the film Short Circuit, one of the A New Hope droids inside the jawa hauler, or maybe a Microsoft Clippy companion), and
5) the all-in-one G3 (wat)
* My first computer was the Yikes! G4/350. What it lacked in performance and internals, it more than made up in design aesthetics. By July 2001, Apple chose to toss it. Welp. Around 1999–2000, there was a tweaked image of a G4 tower floating about which hinted there might have been a limited edition run of Grape G4s in the works, which would have been really nifty.
Sorry, but hard, hard disagree on dissing the clamshell iBook — though I was never terribly fond of blueberry or graphite.
Had it not been for all the misogynist-inflected machismo at the time which winced and threw shade at the clamshell's lines as """feminine""" (its form and function are, plainly put, extremely smart, even if the final product was fairly heavy overall), it's clear from inspecting its logic board that there were were provisional plans for a Rev D. series, with somewhere between 128 and 256mb onboard memory and up to a 600MHz G3 PPC750cx processor (which would show up in the summer 2001 iMacs).
I gather these steady refinements would have been better for product reputation in the near-term, without all the problems which besieged the ice/dual-USB replacement, but it would have detracted from the implementation of a rectangular box (which would probably have come to pass regardless). Had a Rev D. clamshell come to fruition, I reckon there may have been a "Snow" version (with silicone-warm-white-on-polycarbonate-white); the Indigo version may have continued on with an SE; and a third, unique hue (another Apple online store exclusive) which probably never saw light of day with any Apple product (I daresay something like "Canary" or "Lemon").
Definitely the most difficult for me to look at/easiest to look away from:
1) the Quicksilver and MDD G4s*,
2) the eMac,
3) the Flower Power/Blue Dalmatian iMac G3s,
4) (this one may unsettle its fans) the first iMac G4s (which reminded me of something from the film Short Circuit, one of the A New Hope droids inside the jawa hauler, or maybe a Microsoft Clippy companion), and
5) the all-in-one G3 (wat)
* My first computer was the Yikes! G4/350. What it lacked in performance and internals, it more than made up in design aesthetics. By July 2001, Apple chose to toss it. Welp. Around 1999–2000, there was a tweaked image of a G4 tower floating about which hinted there might have been a limited edition run of Grape G4s in the works, which would have been really nifty.
The Clamshell was never going to be an easy sell for an office environment. It was also a step back from the XGA screen size, which had become the de facto standard with the introduction of the G3 notebooks. My iBook SE came with all its paperwork intact, including sales receipts, which indicated that it had only had one careful owner before being unceremoniously hidden under the stairs in a cupboard - a young, female student. I think, your comments notwithstanding, that ended up being its eventual market.
Aesthetics aside, I actually consider it something of an ideal OS 9 gaming laptop.
The reason for that is that many old games run in full screen at 640x480.
A Mainstreet G3, aside from being painful to use in general, has a passive matrix screen that would probably be okay for games of that age but still doesn't look great.
Lombards/Pismos and TiBooks have enough resolution that 640x480 ends up as a painfully small window in the middle of the screen. Of course, I hate down-ressing them too, as it generally looks bad.
On the other hand, 800x600 on a clamshell means that you get a reasonably large image with minimal windowing.
Of course, on the other hand, if you want to run OS X any version or torture yourself on the modern web, 800x600 is painful.
This is also why my "Gaming Cube" has the ADC CRT(and a Geforce 3). I can do 1600x1200 in OS 9 or OS X(and Leopard isn't terrible with that card) but CRTs down-res nicely to whatever you want. Of course, I run another of the ADC CRTs as a secondary monitor on the OS 9 system I use for scanning some light scanning(dual 1.8ghz Sonnet in a DA G4 connected to a SCSI Nikon Coolscan III) since AFAIK this and the entirely too heavy and big 21" Studio display are the only way to calibrate/profile a monitor in OS 9.
In office environments I worked for during those years, several colleagues (this was marketing communications and advertising), women and men alike, bought clamshells, ca. 1999–2001, as these were the first new Mac laptops they could actually afford (as this was Apple's first "consumer" portable). Most of them favoured Blueberry, then the Graphite Rev B. (Not surprisingly, these variants come up most often in used listings.)
With the clamshell iBook, there wasn't "a step back" in resolution because there had never been a consumer-priced Mac laptop before. That against which it competed in the Windows realm were also 800x600 notebooks (and often more spendy, thick, and slow). By design, the clamshells were portable, wireless-ready, and durable. They were marketed at an audience born between the late 1960s and very early 1980s, and just getting their careers going (or in university, with access to education discounts).
The hardest backlash at the time came from writers and critics for IT publications who groused how "emasculating" the design was. Nearly all of these writers were dudes. They weren't going to be buying a consumer laptop anyway, and they had the relative means to spend more on a new laptop they weren't merely reviewing.
Even as Jobs announced Rev. A Tangerine and Blueberry 300MHz clamshells in July 1999, the Kanga and Rev. A Wallstreet PowerBook G3s (both barely more than a year old and running with no more than 250MHz), shipped standard with 800x600 — the latter with passive-matrix.
Pricing for those PowerBooks, as with most prior PowerBooks, constrained who could afford them. Their "professional" advantage was an upgrade path for the CPU and a versatile swap bay. These weren't AirPort-ready, and it wasn't until May 1999 before a PowerBook G3 even featured a USB port (2), whereas the gap between the first PBG3 with Firewire and the Rev. C iBook was only seven months.
The hardest backlash at the time came from writers and critics for IT publications who groused how "emasculating" the design was. Nearly all of these writers were dudes. They weren't going to be buying a consumer laptop anyway, and they had the relative means to spend more on a new laptop they weren't merely reviewing.
Even as Jobs announced Rev. A Tangerine and Blueberry 300MHz clamshells in July 1999, the Kanga and Rev. A Wallstreet PowerBook G3s (both barely more than a year old and running with no more than 250MHz), shipped standard with 800x600 — the latter with passive-matrix.
Pricing for those PowerBooks, as with most prior PowerBooks, constrained who could afford them. Their "professional" advantage was an upgrade path for the CPU and a versatile swap bay. These weren't AirPort-ready, and it wasn't until May 1999 before a PowerBook G3 even featured a USB port (2), whereas the gap between the first PBG3 with Firewire and the Rev. C iBook was only seven months.
So yes, while 800x600 may be tight in an OS X desktop environment (and why the DIY XGA mod project for Rev. C clamshell iBooks is worth the hassle), it was plenty for OS 9 (and so much better than the passive-matrix, black-and-white laptops with sub-640x480 screens still lingering about back then). This was during a time when 1024x768 felt enormous and limited to only the high-end PowerBook G3s.
tl;dr: The office environment wasn't a monolith then. And dudes be fragile.
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Hmm, I'd forgotten about the flower power and blue Dalmatian iMacs. I'm not sure I ever saw either in person - I don't know if that was because they only existed for a short time, or because they were so unpopular they were never stocked anywhere. Certainly they were a weird design decision. From photographs, the flower power one looks okay (if you like that kind of thing), but blue Dalmatian is just odd.
I quite like the clamshell iBooks - I was in the market for a tangerine one when they came out, and liked what I saw in-store, but the price point was just ferocious for what felt like a fairly under-specced machine. This was in New Zealand, and I recall it was something like $3000-ish?
I quite like the clamshell iBooks - I was in the market for a tangerine one when they came out, and liked what I saw in-store, but the price point was just ferocious for what felt like a fairly under-specced machine. This was in New Zealand, and I recall it was something like $3000-ish?
Not quite. The Wallstreet was my first Mac and I still have several of these. Only the bottom end Mainstreet came with a 12" PM 800x600 screen although you could also order one of the Rev B. PDQs with that screen size albeit in TFT. Most Wallstreets/PDQs came with the 14" TFT XGA screen as you can see from what comes up in second hand sales. Mainstreets are fairly unusual and the problematic 13" XGA screens even rarer.
It's also fair to point out that PowerBooks also had at least one PCMCIA/Cardbus slot, which made them all AirPort ready. The rev. A Clamshells dispensed with external ports save for one USB and one ethernet port. There wasn't even a useful video out port (I could never get mine to work, even with the right mirror cable). You gave up a lot to trade down to a Clamshell, which ruled it out for a lot of offices.
And yes, it did get a lot of stick for its My First Little Laptop appearance.
Passive Matrix pretty much ended on laptops around 2000. Active Matrix became the standard. Passive were great for privacy... but that's about it.
It's also got a better keyboard than portable currently offered by Apple.The eMate isn't a PowerPC system but is still RISC, and was kinda the first netbook. It is also from the PowerPC era being released in 97 and discontinued in 98. This has a 25MHz ARM CPU.
It looks like something out of a scifi film. I both love and hate the look.
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Really? Good grief.
The 14" iBook gets my vote, if I absolutely had to pick something. It just seems out of proportion, like a stretched 12" iBook. Truthfully though, none of the PowerPC machines are offensive to me.
The modified Clamshells that pollute eBay... ugh. Those are truly ugly, but not by Apple's design.
The modified Clamshells that pollute eBay... ugh. Those are truly ugly, but not by Apple's design.
I would have to vote for the mirrored drive doors G4 towers. The G4 started as a nice update of the G3 tower - a bit more "pro" in grey shades. And then they started adding bits to it, culminating in the mirrored drive doors which just look like someone took out the standard drives and replaced them with some whacky third-party drives. They are so bizarre and out of place, and then it has the weird air intakes underneath.
Quicksilver? Great. Sleek.
MDD? Yikes
why would you need to put a slot in the mirror disk drive cover? It can be flipped down as needed.
I'm gonna throw in another vote for the 14" iBook. It's such an odd little beast. I have one here, and between it and my 12" PowerBook, I use the PowerBook every time despite the iBook having more RAM and the bigger screen. The fact that it took the 12" form factor and just added more bezels around it on the bottom and a larger, same-resolution screen on the top always struck me as an odd choice for a new laptop. It's certainly not a *bad* machine, but it's just super odd and looks weirdly proportioned, like it wasn't meant to be what it is.
That man, the one who desecrates clamshell iBooks, who corners the market on used parts (especially key lime parts), and who then calls his rotten abominations "P R O T O T Y P E A R T", with four-figure price tags?
He's the rare character who raises my adrenaline to vexatious levels.
I still love that design. In real life, with light shining through the transparent material (acrylic with white material behind it rather than just white plastic like eMac had) it gives a great effect. Just like the iPod had, also still visible on more recent white glass iPhones. And I do love acrylic and classic Apple white.
The gigantic Intel 24" being the coolest version of course.
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From many angles, eMac would be in the running of getting my vote. Besides older discolored grey PPC Macs. But eMac was my very first Mac (in 2009) and so I love it. It also had an acrylic stand, which, again, I love.
Not great looking:
...but it had a cool stand:
Cute!
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You've hurt
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This may ruffle some feathers... but here goes. The iBook G3 clamshell is the ugliest PowerPC laptop in my opinion.
Good grief! Someone found a way to make one even uglier!
It's OK, you're allowed to be wrong.
along with the wall street powerbook, the clamshell iBook were the sexiest laptops apple never made and are still in the top 5/top 10
heck if apple scaled up the chassis and threw a 2015 rMBP internals into it i'd upgrade.
you have to admit they looked way better then the white G3 and G4 iBooks they were so boring.
side note: can we all agree PowerMac/PowerBook sounds way better than Mac Pro/MacBook Pro.
still mad about that change, the Power name even predated the switch to PPC so dropping it when they dropped PPC was a bogus excuse.
NO!!Hideous I think.
watch the commercial, its melts your heart.
he's like your pixar lampshade robot buddy, how can you call it ugly
Out of curiosity, what product had the Power branding before it had a PPC chip? There was Performa...
I think the Mac branding is stronger than Power. I never understood why a PowerBook or iBook wasn’t a Mac. PowerMacBook? If iMac wasn’t such an iconic brand, just Mac would make more sense. I guess it’s more about nostalgia than logic