Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Value of 12-inch PowerBook
- Thread starter ccbc
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Ensure it's got a decent battery - the chances of finding a replacement are slim.
If it's got a healthy battery I'd say £100
I'd say that is a good fair price, but you need the exact start-up disks to reboot the powerbook
through experience, I had a G4 powerbook but lost the osx discs and could not find any online in 2009
the the hard drive crashed.
so i donated that to a costa rican computer exchange program.
personally i would pay $75 for a pristine powerbook G4 12"
only with the start up disks tho.
through experience, I had a G4 powerbook but lost the osx discs and could not find any online in 2009
the the hard drive crashed.
so i donated that to a costa rican computer exchange program.
personally i would pay $75 for a pristine powerbook G4 12"
only with the start up disks tho.
1-hr battery life at the moment (probably helped with the HDD being replaced by a SSD). Can we easily remanufacture the battery with new cells?
I've not heard of anyone doing that on this model - and "easily" isn't a term that springs to mind!
You can run the CPU in reduced mode which clocks it down to around 800Mhz - I do this with mine, which is in immaculate condition apart from an ailing thermal system - another thing to look out for, a noisy fan!
When the battery is dead as a rock, does it impact the performance like the newer MBP?
Interesting. I wasn’t aware the PB G4 12 — in particular, the last revision — down-clocked in absence of a working battery. During the brief time I had a (mostly) working 1.5GHz 12-inch with depleted battery, I hadn’t noticed the performance hit coming from the CPU/logic board frequency so much as the strain of trying to run Leopard with 256MB of onboard RAM (as the sole RAM slot was faulty).
I wonder what the line of decision by the product engineers was on whether to have open firmware on the later G4 laptops down-clock or not, as we know how several of the Titanium models did down-clock without a working battery, but at the very least, the final 15- and 17-inch models did not (as I came to learn first with my 15-inch A1138, whose overall Geekbench 2 scores revealed it did as well or better than even Everymac’s reference score with a working, likely new battery).
To answer @ccbc : I’m not in the market for another 1.5GHz 12-inch A1104, but if I were, it would be to do two difficult modifications on it, neither being very cheap. Which is to say: I would pay a premium for, say, one in under-used/approaching mint condition with the original, matching box, as I’d rather spend money on those modifications if I know the whole of the chassis, human interface (keyboard/trackpad), logic board, RAM slot (especially!), and all ports were working, and an original battery still had life left in it.
For something like that model, unless one was just given to me in whatever condition it was being donated (and which, heck yes, I would accept!), I’d want a really clean, well-cared-for example. I’d want to know that the keyboard was working well, as it’s perfect as a writing laptop.
tl;dr: for the condition I’d be looking for, I’d be willing to pay, say, up to CAD$200–300 for one with the original box and in excellent shape. For a beat-up, heavily-loved example with a bunch of “surprise!” issues hidden within, maybe CAD$50.
Last edited:
No, no - I wasn't referring to that, I mean selecting Reduced in System Preferences Power settings - Geekbenching in this mode points to the CPU running at around half speed.
It's a trick to prevent the fan blasting away - also used that method on an ailing Power Mac G5 2.3 years ago.
Not sure - I've been lucky enough to never have a Powerbook with a dead battery!
Ohhhhhh gotcha. That makes a heck of a lot more sense.
Yes, you have to wrangle some Open Firmware commands to do that - the problem is writing the ISO to the USB - the process seems to be very picky about particular brands (in my experience anyway.)
Sure, disk images from macintoshgarden/archive.org work fine written to optical media.
I've been online with PowerPCs since 2001 - no trouble yet....
That you know of. Modern security tools that would detect the compromise won’t even run on those. We say there are two kinds of people: Those that know they’ve been hacked, and those that don’t know they've been hacked.
There are a huge number of known security vulnerabilities the further back you go. and the browsers on the ppc os's can’t even run the current cryptographic protocols (Which is going to render them completely unusable in the near future). Apple doesn’t guarantee backports beyond the current version, let alone ancient versions. Running anything older than n-1 and especially older than n-2 is asking to be compromised.
This is a PowerBook we’re talking about, not the 12” Retina MacBook. Also the 2019 Air still had the defective keyboard.
You do realize this is the PPC Mac subforum?
Last edited:
No offense, but, do you actually use any PowerPC hardware? How are you not familiar with TenFourFox nor InterWebPPC?
You do you, obviously.
The rest of your remarks are, meanwhile, off-topic and also non-constructive here.
They ignore security updates on the continuing PowerPC browsers for OS X, which nominally is the main conduit through which most folks access features on the internet. Even so, some of the latest XHR/JS-based push features are ignored completely by browsers with older engines, even when their security certificates are kept current (parity with modern engine browsers, such as Quantum). And push features are a great place for exploitation via malicious code injection. There are, of course, other malicious tactics, but they’re targeting users whose stuff is just a hair out of date. That pretty much leaves out all PowerPC Macs.
They ignore security measures in currently-supported, GNU binaries supplied by macports.
They ignore the security by obscurity of running PowerPC-based OS X, in a time when fresh exploits are going to be preoccupied with later Intel or Silicon hardware, as that’s where the bulk of active Macs online live.
They ignore community-based patches for shell exploits.
And if that isn’t sufficient, one can still run a current flavour of Linux, like Void, Adelie, or Debian Sid remix, or they can run OpenBSD — all of which will have access to the most current security and cryptography libraries for the most paranoid power user who likes opening a Tor browser on their G5, or whatever.
But most of all, you’re presenting your threadbare remarks before an audience who knows, discusses, reviews, and tests the extant security risks out there, along with mitigation strategies, and they also know how to make things work well in 2023 on PowerPC Macs (which someone who hasn’t touched one in more than a decade simply wouldn’t know).
For your benefit, read the room.
Last edited:
There are a couple companies that will do it. The cells are not hard to replace, but the little battery computer chip is usually a pain work with.
I think people that are looking to buy or run a PPC Mac do so for the love and appreciation of past and iconic technology, not to do their banking or put sensitive info of them, I'm sure people on the subforum is well aware of all this as you point correctly.
I'll say though that these threads sometimes get promoted to the carousel of recent threads on the homepage and just like the person you respond to I came straight from there without realizing there was a specific community hanging out in this subforum lol.