Value of 12-inch PowerBook

[GMShadow]

Holy crap that's a good looking iBook.

My recent longing for my old 12" PowerBook brought me here. Back in 2012, a friend came to visit and surprised me with a nearly pristine PowerBook 12" 1.33GHz I think it was. Battery worked and it had everything, including max RAM and AirPort. I lived on that machine designing my website, making business cards, using CAD software, etc. for well over a year before a computer repair customer forfeited their MacBook after the cost of the repair. I still have the MacBook but wish I had the PowerBook. I honestly don't know where it went.

If you're wondering, I was able to get along fairly well in 2012 using a PowerBook from 2003. That was at the ragged edge of its usefulness, though. It was losing compatibility with web 2.0 and developers had fled PPC years before so support was drying up. I've heard so many people swear to the performance of PowerPC Macs but they don't tell you that their claims usually requires that videos be in very particular formats or use very particular software and optimization tweaks etc.

It sucked. For what you're looking for, though, I think you've got quite the machine. Yours will likely fly with Tiger. I find that old Macs play quite nicely with the most modern ones. I have absolutely no issue sharing files across my network from my M1 Macs to my G4 mini. I would say my Mac mini is enjoyable enough that I will not plan to ever get rid of it. It kind of has a hard time with any of the major games from the era, including Halo, but otherwise plays Sims and Simcity quite well. It's just nice to squeeze what I can out of it but without the expectation it will ever get online.

You should google the "penny" fix for iBook's as, if I recall, the G4's had a notorious issue with some solder balls or something and I remedied a dozen with a simple shim. I never resorted to the heat-gun treatment nor would I ever.

What a pleasant experience it must be to type on that thing and carry it around. I do hope to hear that you find a source to replace (rebuild) the battery. Look into getting an adapter to put a small SSD in there and expand the storage. It's not really going to do much to improve throughput (it's still IDE) but it helps the battery last, it runs quieter, and you won't have to hold your breath for the inevitable death. Personally, I'm simply going to adapt a SATA drive to my G4 mini because I enjoy the sound of a hard drive clicking and whirring away. I really believe it's part of the experience with vintage computing which is why I am sweating the inevitable death of my Quadra's super loud SCSI drive. If you're a purist, there are still brand new (old stock) IDE drives out there from Western Digital and Hitachi but be sure to buy from somebody reputable because it is just as likely it's a knock-off.

Again, you have quite the beautiful iBook. I think you'd regret if you got bored and sold it.

The 1.33 12” and the 1.42 14” (as posted above) don’t have GPU issues due to both a new GPU (which is also Core Image capable) and revised design.

They *do* tend to have issues with the Hall effect sensor used for detecting the lid has been closed going bad, which causes them to sleep at random. Fortunately that can be unplugged through the RAM door under the keyboard, and doesn’t require disassembly.

 

[B S Magnet]

Hey everybody, I just replaced the thermal paste, and HDD with an SSD in my 12" PB G4.. After about 1.5 hours of work, I popped in a Leopard DVD, and amazingly my Superdrive doesn't work.. The disc wasn't "sucked in".. and the drive made no noise.. Any ideas? Cable appeared to be plugged in when I reassembled laptop.

As the very first step, open System Profiler to view what the ATA tab shows. If the SuperDrive drive is receiving signal and reporting itself to the system, you should see it show up there. If it does, yet you’re not able to get it to pull in a disc, then the motor may be failing.

What is more likely, if the motor is fine (which, if it was prior to, should still be fine now): these devices use a socket-type connection with the logic board. This low-res close-up is from iFixit’s guide:

In the past, I have had something as innocuous as a fleck of old thermal paste get lodged inside one of these sockets when I re-connected the flat cable, preventing all the connections from making contact and the device not showing up and/or not working once I powered things back on.

Although this may not be the case (pun not intended) here with your PowerBook, it will (annoyingly and) probably necessitate re-opening the top-case to inspect the connector and connection, to make sure both are clean and free of any debris. Hopefully this should be the case, and re-connection/seating of this cable.

Let us know how it goes.

 

[B S Magnet]

You should google the "penny" fix for iBook's as, if I recall, the G4's had a notorious issue with some solder balls or something and I remedied a dozen with a simple shim. I never resorted to the heat-gun treatment nor would I ever.

The issue you describe here does not affect final-run iBook G4s, all which shipped with the Mobility Radeon 9550 GPU.

As memory serves, this was an issue confined principally to the iBook G3s, between the first dual-USB iteration in 2001 and the final opaque G3 iteration in 2003. I don’t think the G4 series from 2004 forward was susceptible to this problem. Someone with applied experience here ought to verify this span of impacted models.

 

[Rikintosh]

Here in Brazil I usually find them for very low prices (I think there are less mac maniacs in Brazil, due to less people having contact with macs due to the very high price at that time. I've never sold a item on ebay, but sometimes I think about buying them here and listing them on ebay for the international market to make some money), I don't know the computer market in your country, so I can't give a price, but what I can say is that anyone who buys something second-hand is going to want it to work perfectly, or else they won't pay what you want. I therefore recommend that you purchase mac os x 10.4, format it in a fresh installation, and perhaps install one or another game to demonstrate its proper functioning (most apple lappys when they have a problem are the gpu failing), of a good look at it, its case is metal, make sure there are no dents or damages, as that would be very devalued in the eyes of a collector. The screen usually has a "shadow" in the lower center, due to the heat that the fan releases on it. Though common to all models, this is also a value disqualifier.

If your lappy has a wireless card, make sure to mention it in your ad, because at that time, many of them didn't come with wifi, and were sold as options.

If you are technically savvy enough, you could open it up, change the thermal pads, clean the fan, and maybe add an ssd, it wouldn't bring you big profits, but it would certainly make you sell it very quickly.

Access to the interior of the PBG4 12 is done through 2 very small screws on the keyboard, to gain access to them, it is necessary to remove two keys, but it is common for people to break the keys for not knowing how to remove them properly, so if the yours has good keys, make sure to mention that.

I hope my knowledge has helped you in some way.

 

[Rikintosh]

The issue you describe here does not affect final-run iBook G4s, all which shipped with the Mobility Radeon 9550 GPU.

As memory serves, this was an issue confined principally to the iBook G3s, between the first dual-USB iteration in 2001 and the final opaque G3 iteration in 2003. I don’t think the G4 series from 2004 forward was susceptible to this problem. Someone with applied experience here ought to verify this span of impacted models.

That happened because apple, in a stupid decision, decided to install the video chip upside down, and without adequate cooling. The engineers thought that lowering the clock would be enough to manage the generated heat. The heatsink of the chip was that aluminum sheet that exists under the ibook, it also used a low quality thermalpad. After the video chip moved to the top side of the card, and was cooled by the same CPU heatsink things got better (a bit, as cooling has always been an issue on ibooks)

 

[ww2_1943]

I agree, but I’m also heavily biased here.

I don’t see why Apple couldn’t have released SL for PPC as a retail release, though with some features left unavailable to a PPC device by dint of not having the right architecture — not unlike how recent iterations of macOS have Silicon-only features which not even the latest and last of the Intel Macs can use, yet Intel Macs can still run those macOS versions. For example, PowerPC Macs wouldn’t have had access to OpenCL, but could have had legacy support for pre-OpenCL GPUs to accommodate PowerPC users. Further, only final-edition PowerPC Macs would have had the means to keep up well with a PowerPC-accommodated retail release of Snow Leopard (namely, with features like support for PCIe, SATA, and processing speed grading).

But… welp.

Overall, it doesn't seem like SL would have offered PPC users much more than the last PPC version of Leopard. Maybe a another couple of years of Safari and iTunes support. I am speaking as a lay-person though.

 

[B S Magnet]

Overall, it doesn't seem like SL would have offered PPC users much more than the last PPC version of Leopard. Maybe a another couple of years of Safari and iTunes support. I am speaking as a lay-person though.

Correct. There were other cumulative improvements, as well.

This was a business case to favour continuing support for at least the last of the PowerPC Mac buyers — particularly those who bought Mac gear which shipped with 10.4.2 and up — or, at least 10.4.0+. Ultimately, Apple (or Steve) panned this plan.

There were a mess of stability improvements brought into SL, as well as UI refinements (like changing the default gamma from 1.8 to 2.2 and tightening the desktop grid slightly) which are subtle, but easier on the eyes over time. For worse or better, Core Animation was also brought to the UI.

Finder was re-written natively in Cocoa, which made a big difference in overhead and performance. Open/save dialogue boxes allowed for more columns (including kind and label). QuickLook file preview performance improved significantly, as did having a slider available to every Finder window in Icon view.

On-the-fly file compression was another improvement (notable since the basic Leopard installation was bundled accidentally with a lot of space-consuming, superfluous files which had no impact on the functionality on the system). This would have given Apple a lot to boast about for those PowerPC users on Leopard whose spinning rust was taken up disproportionately by the OS alone. Grand Central Dispatch for the multi-core G5s would have provided optimizations.

Underneath, LLVM and clang support, out of box, for PowerPC systems would have saved a lot of developer headaches as the transition to Intel was nearing its completion.

And though highly unlikely even in the most optimistic, dual-platform-accommodating circumstances, a bi-directional Rosetta could have eased the hard line between the two CPU platforms.

So yes, while a universal binary of SL would have had fewer features at the disposal of PowerPC Mac users, it still would have been given two more years of company support (noteworthy given how by that time, running a daily driver for more than three years was no longer unusual). Someone buying their multi-core G5 in early-mid 2006 (or even as late as September 2006, as Apple still filled G5 orders after the release of the Mac Pro for roughly a month) would have still had OS support come August 2009, with security updates carrying on well into 2013.

As it was, though, one could have current OS support run out on their PowerPC Mac before their AppleCare plan did.

 

[Amethyst1]

This was a business case to favour continuing support for at least the last of the PowerPC Mac buyers — particularly those who bought Mac gear which shipped with 10.4.2 and up — or, at least 10.4.0+.

If it hadn't been for the fact that both some of the last PPC Macs and the very first Intel Macs were 32-bit machines, that hypothetical universal SL might have been a 64-bit only release. I wonder if that was the plan.

So yes, while a universal binary of SL would have had fewer features at the disposal of PowerPC Mac users, it still would have been given two more years of company support [...]

...and possibly have resulted in longer PPC support by third-party application developers as well.

 

[ww2_1943]

Finder was re-written natively in Cocoa, which made a big difference in overhead and performance. Open/save dialogue boxes allowed for more columns (including kind and label). QuickLook file preview performance improved significantly, as did having a slider available to every Finder window in Icon view.

Could that theoretically be ported over to OS X 10.5? I suppose if it could, it would have already.

Grand Central Dispatch for the multi-core G5s would have provided optimizations.

Is GDC implemented in PPC developer previews of SL? I thought I read somewhere that would only work with Intel (I could be mistaken)

So yes, while a universal binary of SL would have had fewer features at the disposal of PowerPC Mac users, it still would have been given two more years of company support (noteworthy given how by that time, running a daily driver for more than three years was no longer unusual). Someone buying their multi-core G5 in early-mid 2006 (or even as late as September 2006, as Apple still filled G5 orders after the release of the Mac Pro for roughly a month) would have still had OS support come August 2009, with security updates carrying on well into 2013.

As it was, though, one could have current OS support run out on their PowerPC Mac before their AppleCare plan did.

Great points. I see this as the main benefit.

 

[B S Magnet]

Could that theoretically be ported over to OS X 10.5? I suppose if it could, it would have already.

Not the iteration to appear in the retail-ready SL, no.

I have, however, managed to get the iteration of QuickLook in the developer build of 10A96 to play more nicely on PowerPC Macs, but this involved pulling from the later frameworks in 10.5.8 (Build 10A96 coincided with around the time of 10.5.3 or 10.5.4). The version to premiere in 10.6.0 in 2009 was heavily re-written and modified by that point (so much so that it was a different creature from QuickLook in 10.5.8, which came out maybe a week or two before 10.6.0).

Is GDC implemented in PPC developer previews of SL? I thought I read somewhere that would only work with Intel (I could be mistaken)

No. GCD didn’t begin to appear in developer builds until fairly later during the development cycle. A quick glance at Table 1 in the Clouded Leopard WikiPost doesn’t note when GCD appeared, but Apple’s developer notes would (and are linked from that table).

As memory serves, GCD didn’t get a roll-out until sometime between Builds 10A286 (when the full Cocoa Finder débuted) and Build 10A335, or thereabouts. The Golden Master for 10.6.0 was around Build 10A432 — which is to say that GCD didn’t start appearing in the stream until sometime between maybe March and May of 2009 (for comparison, Build 10A96 is from June 2008 and Build 10A190 is from October).