Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)
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It was designed and built by IBM Japan, which was lucky for me when I spilled tea into mine...while I was in Tokyo. I was able to get a same day repair by walking it over to some random shop in the Akihabara (apple sent me there) where some guy repaired it while I watched.
While massive by today's standards, it was svelte for its time, and attracted stares whenI would pull it out. Great for operating on a plane too.
I’ve recently settled on using an iPad Pro 10 inch. I would prefer a proper OS but 95% of what I do I can do with iOS.
Since its running Coreboot/SeaBIOS now it won't boot Windows. That's fine though became it runs the XFCE edition of Manjaro just fine.
That said, I do also use and enjoy my 10.6" iPad Pro with magic keyboard. It's unfortunate that the keyboard has to be so heavy, so the whole thing doesn't tip over. It doesn't end up being much lighter than my 13" M2 MBA as a result.
I think the ipad pro with the "magic keyboard" weighs more than a macbook air...?
* Note: I do all my development in Emacs, not a heavyweight development system and generally do the builds on a remote linux machine so the slowness of the machine wasn't the big deal for me that it might have been for others. But sometimes, if the network was slow, I compiled locally and it was still fast compared to the much older machines we used to use!
12 inch Powerbooks: 4.6 lbs., 1.18" H x 10.9" W x 8.6" D
12 inch Macbook: 2.03 lbs., 0.14-0.52" H x 11.04" W x 7.74" D
Current MBA M2: 2.7 lbs., 0.44" H x 11.97" W x 8.46" D
So widest of them all, in the middle for weight and depth.
The current Macbook Air IMHO completely misses the whole point of what the Air line stood for, it's really just a Macbook Non-Pro, while the Retina MB was the proper Macbook air in the lineup.
Calling a machine a "Pro" version was brilliant, because most people don't want to consider themselves an amateur.
And here we are, bunch of tech nerds who really are pro subverting the paradigm!
https://liliputing.com/one-mix-4-mini-laptop-review-10-inch-...
Not sure if its still available, but there are other machines like it, such as those from GPD.
Excellent build quality thanks to IBM Japan who thankfully incorporated the inverted T arrow keys, a first for an Apple notebook, which still persists to today's MacBooks. The 2400c excellent build quality also doesn't suffer from poor hinges like the PowerBook 500/5300/1400c models.
The processor is on a daughterboard allowing the 2400c to be upgraded to a G3, and the modding scene out of Japan has brought a ton of interesting upgrades like translucent cases and keyboards.
The main problems the 2400c suffers from are leaky PRAM batteries and other issues causing the dreaded Green Light of Death (GLoD), where the machine won't boot without hardware replacements like a new processor card.
Have you run BSD or anything on it or just classic macos?
The one complaint is that the keyboard (both US and Japanese) is just a tad small for comfort. The Wallstreet/Pismo keyboards were much better and a favourite of mine.
Their next laptop was the G4 titanium, which rotated the logo to be right side up when looking at the back of the screen while it's open.
Out: YOU have a Macintosh
In: $$ THIS GUY $$ has a $$ Macintosh $$
Couldn't say what the original intent was, I guess if you leave the laptop closed on your desk when you aren't using it that would be nicer to look at? But realistically I'd see it that way for about half a second between closing the laptop and sticking it in a bag.
i tried looking at ifixit teardowns and couldn't tell.
It struggled with some design problems, notably that the hinges failed, and the display ribbon rubbed causing display problems after been opened/closed too many times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4
If we head back to 68k days, then the Powerbook Duo was awesome. This was definitely a compromised machine for portability vs a desktop though.
They never were able to deliver a G5 laptop. And then Apple went Intel, one of the greatest WTFs in recent memory.
It's marketing, that's what it does, but an about-face like that is eyebrow-raising.
Gather 'round and we'll talk about clones next!
For its time, it was a speedy Mac. Sure, the spinning hard drive wasn’t ideal, but that was the norm back then. As others have noted, getting inside to replace something like RAM was easy, by little more than just lifting up the keyboard. Built-in Firewire proved beneficial since I got an external disc burner as the machine didn’t have one natively. Likewise, I later got the add-on Airport card (802.11b), which was my first exposure to WiFi internet and felt liberating, no longer tethered to a modem. Installation of that Airport card is another example of how the flip-up keyboard made this upgrade easy.
The big feature I think most users appreciated were the hot-swappable bays. By default on my machine, one had a battery and the other the CD/DVD drive. There were plenty of useful capabilities with these, notably a second battery—maybe you’d get 10 hours unplugged—or things like a ZIP drive. To swap an item in a bay was as simple as pulling a small lever to eject an item, and merely inserting another item until it clicked into place. All told, a couple of seconds.
One notable, unavoidable downside to the machine was its weight—put it in a laptop bag of that era along with a power cord and weight was going to be at least 10 pounds all in, to say nothing of other things one might want on the go. This wasn’t outrageous for its time, but it shows how much bulkier and heavier things were then. And while the keyboard was well-designed for accessing the machine’s innards, it wasn’t a particularly good keyboard to type on because it was a thin plastic that had a lot of flex to it.
In Apple behavior that continues to this day, the default memory capacities were on the low end. It was officially capable of 512 MB of RAM (unofficially 1 GB), but shipped with 128 MB. Hard drives were either 12 GB or 20 GB.
For its time in the Mac world, the machine was great (I can’t compare it to Windows notebooks of that era). But things have changed, as they usually do. That screen looks pathetic today, it’s loud and easily louder from being taxed, there was no MagSafe, plastic is less pleasant in long-term use, etc. But for the capabilities most users wanted at the turn of the century, it was a great machine if you were a Mac user.
Running OS 9 on modern storage (SSD), it's surprising how responsive it is for most tasks with a single core sub-gigahertz CPU and RAM capacity below the on-disk size of many apps these days. Much of any impression of slowness in day-to-day use when it was current was almost certainly a result of its mechanical HDD.
and today you can't boot shit on 16MB.even raspbian or something is going to croak even with XFCE and the lightest-weight setup you can do (short of raw terminal - I did get ubuntu server with fbdev running on a thinkpad with 256MB, although the mach64 driver is in an absolute state at this point).
(menuetOS is a fun regression along this line - a full multiprocessing OS with all the fixings, in x86/x64 assembly, that fits on a 1.44 inch floppy disk)
I know that a lot of that power and memory has been spent on isolation and security, but part of the reason we need that security is because we've turned the browser and OS into a sandbox running untrusted code loading off the internet. It is interesting to watch this video of linus getting a xserve running (challenging due to cert expiration, discontinued services, etc), and part of the OSX Server Tools suite is things like time machine backup host, ichat host (self-hosted XMPP chat server!) and so on, and the point linus makes is that apple saw the way the wind was blowing and decided it would be more profitable to sell the service than the hardware. And writ large that's the tradeoff we've made from the macos 9 era to the modern one. Slower, browser-based and cloud-based applications instead of self-hosted or local applications.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnj7LvhvR4
Anyway yes, I have done the same thing as you and original OP and put a mSATA drive in an IDE adapter to get an old machine running, and used a SATA SSD to juice up a cheap laptop when my nice one died in grad school, etc, and a SSD and maxing out the memory (if possible) does make a substantial difference.
People usually tend to think like "it's an old machine, it is running slow anyway" but actually I think it's the opposite and you should think "it's an old machine and it needs all the help it can get". It has little enough processing power already, at least let it progress at the rate of processing and not spend 3/4ths of its cycles waiting for disk!
I ran Windows 3.0 on a 16MHz 386sx with 5MB of RAM and a 40MB disk. That's with a graphical word processor, PostScript Fonts, and a set of speedy graphical development tools. (Turbo Pascal for Windows)
In today's world, you'd be hard pressed to find many embedded devices with such minimal specs [1], but in 1991 it was a useful and complete desktop computing environment. [2]
1] Less than ten years later (1998-1999), I was doing embedded development work. The device I was working on would fit in the palm of your hand and ran an AMD Elan SC400 - a 486/33 class device that would've been better than a top of the line desktop PC in 1991-2.
2] In the interest of full disclosure, my next machine was a 486/33, which was followed by a P5-100 a few years later. Both of those machines provided game changing levels of new power. There were important workloads that were enabled by each of the two upgrades. My current machines are a lot better than either of those two, but I don't think any subsequent upgrade was as close to as significant as those two were in terms of local application functionality. (But I don't game.)
Conversely though, I was surprised by how far an LC 575 with 33mhz 68LC040 I was tinkering with once was able to be pushed, even without hijinks like upgrade cards. I imagine for many users of such machines the impetus to upgrade had more to do with compatible software going extinct than lack of raw power.
My first computer upgrade was from a 4.77MHz 8088 to a 16MHz 386SX. Easily over an order of magnitude improvement. Next two upgrades were in the x3-4 range, and after that point I stopped caring. (The upgrade after those two was another x3, but I sold it after a few months and bought a laptop with half the power but would always be with me.)
one of those is 64mb to run really nicely, one is 256mb at the start and probably 2GB+ by the end, and the last one is like, you really probably want at least 16, 8 is getting to be a scant spec choice even today. Going for 2x32gb is less than $100 now! (good time to buy, flash and DRAM are glutted and this won't last forever)
NT was solid enough as a UI (although iirc NT 3.5 was sort of "3.11 and a half") but by NT 4 and win2000 it had pretty much emerged into the modern UX. And Win2000 still ran on peanuts by modern standards. I never used NT but my dad generally thought highly of it afaik.
I suppose there's an interesting parallel between macos trying to shed cooperative multitaking (and the legacy of the pre-32 bit ROM) with windows 6/7 and windows finally maturing in the 3.1-95 and NT-win2000 era with shedding the legacy of DOS and the low-level x86 poking. OSs seemed to hit a point in that era where it was no longer tolerable to support their legacy shit forever from the hobby-hardware era.
There were shells even available before Windows 3 that provided a folder style desktop metaphor. HP NewWave immediately comes to mind, and it ran on very limited hardware.
> NT was solid enough as a UI (although iirc NT 3.5 was sort of "3.11 and a half")
NT predated Windows 95. If you weren't paying attention, NT 3.1 and 3.5 looked essentially identical to Windows 3.1. Just with a totally different (much better) implementation and dramatically higher system requirements. They also enabled "32-bit" code, which made it easier to access the large amounts of data needed for image and video manipulation.
The higher system requirements of NT are what motivated Microsoft to also build rudimentary 32-bit support into classic Windows. This started out as Win32s, which enabled Windows 3.1 to run 32-bit apps written to a very strict subset of the Win32 API. Win32s then evolved into the 32-bit support offered by Windows 95, but even then, Windows 95 was a 16/32-bit hybrid. This let Microsoft advertise 4MB system requirements for 95, as opposed to the 16-32 for NT.
> but by NT 4 and win2000 it had pretty much emerged into the modern UX.
NT4's big innovation was to take the new 95 UI and put it on the NT kernel. 2000 was a big step forward, but mainly stability and enterprise featurres.
> And Win2000 still ran on peanuts by modern standards.
IIRC, I ran it usefully on a 256MB P3.
> I never used NT but my dad generally thought highly of it afaik.
I used it for a while, but really only NT4 through about XP. I remember it being a dramatic improvement over 3.x/95 in terms of both features and stability.
Where the Microsoft OS's fall short IMO is that Microsoft has had the resources to pursue all sorts of various designs over the years, but have lacked the coherency of vision to make a product that really feels like it holds together as a consistent whole. The capabilities are there, and in some ways better than Unix, but it's never felt quite right, at least to me.
The Wallstreet also had a rainbow Apple logo under the screen like a proper Mac laptop. ;)
But if you're looking for a retro one, the Wallstreet ones had some major reliability issues that they improved in the Lombard and Pismo.
A bit silly to talk about how fast installing OS 9 on an SSD is, though. The original HD would be way slower.
I can’t remember if it was the 2012 or 2016 MBP, but it was about 10 years between the TiBook and the next Apple portable with as accurate color representation. It was even longer before another Mac laptop had a screen as thin with bezels as small.
Picking mine up for the first time in several years, I’m shocked at how huge and heavy it was. In its day it was 30-50% thinner and lighter than a high end Dell.
I definitely prefer a modern machine because of speed, portability, and battery life. I'd consider picking up one of these just for nostalgia sake though to use for fun side projects.
Also, I kinda miss control strip.
I was gifted a Wallstreet that included working PCMCIA USB and Firewire cards. With floppy and CD in the expansion slots it's a great bridge machine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/13l7tyd/some_...
* Apple's PowerBook reinvented the laptop thirty years ago | AppleInsider || https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/10/21/apples-powerbook-...
- Over 100MB is useful for a lot of things - Backwards compatible with standard 3.5" floppies (though I'm a PC user; they were apparently spotty with old-school 400/800K Mac GCR formatted floppies) - Eventually could store up to 32MB on a cheap 1.44MB floppy (but required writing all 32MB in one go; kind of like a very limited SMR)
They were just far too late to the game, as Zip had established itself and affordable CD Burners were hot on their heels.
Looks very modern, not really like a “classic” old-style PhpBB with tons of annoying icons and signatures.
However, other than the speedy OS upgrade, and maybe a lot of ports, I'm not sure what the "better 20 years ago" parts were, but maybe that was more of a random line / opinion type thing.
Either way fun read and visually that laptop is still pretty pleasing. I love my MBA but ... wouldn't mind if it was a bit more organic looking like the G3.
I had a Pismo, which I got with my student discount (and it was still crazily expensive I remember, but not quite how much). It was a good machine, being able to swap batteries / drives / PC cards was slick (sure, now we have usb-c, but where's the clever engineering in that?)
That's not really true. The Os9 installer actually invites you register your computer with apple (and maybe even sign up for an apple account, been a hot minute since I've seen the dialogue). But you can just click through it if you don't want to.
Helps when you don't have to start up a dedicated web browser instance for every single application you have.