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Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

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Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#41

Post by cesaref »

I think the best PowerPC based apple laptop was the Powerbook G4 titanium. It's pretty much a design classic, was lightweight, and ran OS9. It was I think the first Mac that didn't feel like a massive compromise when running a laptop vs a desktop machine. It introduced widescreen displays, and the 1Ghz model even came with a DVD writer if I remember.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#42

Post by wlesieutre »

usrusr wrote: post #30
numpad0 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol no, Macintosh was always a status symbol.

In the days of those early G3, every non-stationary computer was a status symbol.

$2500 laptop in 2000 is equivalent to $4,457 in 2023 dollars

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#43

Post by justinator »

cesaref wrote: post #41

I think the best PowerPC based apple laptop was the Powerbook G4 titanium. It's pretty much a design classic, was lightweight, and ran OS9. It was I think the first Mac that didn't feel like a massive compromise when running a laptop vs a desktop machine. It introduced widescreen displays, and the 1Ghz model even came with a DVD writer if I remember. It struggled with some design problems, notably that the hinges fai…

This laptop was destined to be an all-time classic, but they could never get the G4 to perform well in a laptop. They promised much, delivered little.

They never were able to deliver a G5 laptop. And then Apple went Intel, one of the greatest WTFs in recent memory.

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#44

Post by gnicholas »

atdrummond wrote: post #27
gumby wrote: post #22

I had a Pismo and it was great, but IMHO the greatest of that generation was the 2400c which was the smallest powerbook, great for anyone who spent a lot of time flying around. 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 gu…

I’ve spent years trying to get back to the sub-12” notebooks of that era. 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.

I loved my 12" Powerbook, but I recognize that the size/weight tradeoffs make somewhat larger laptops more desirable these days. For example, the bezels are much smaller, so a laptop that has the same size footprint as my old 12" PB would actually have a larger screen. Laptops are also much thinner now, which means that part of what I loved about the 12" PB (it's relatively light weight) can now be achieved in a larger form factor.

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.

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#45

Post by gumby »

atdrummond wrote: post #27
gumby wrote: post #22

I had a Pismo and it was great, but IMHO the greatest of that generation was the 2400c which was the smallest powerbook, great for anyone who spent a lot of time flying around. 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 gu…

I’ve spent years trying to get back to the sub-12” notebooks of that era. 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.

I was really happy with the now discontinued 12" macbook. Yes it was dog slow, but I did a lot of development on it* and it happily traveled with me around the world and back and forth. It was so light I would often have to check my bag to see if I'd forgotten it. That happens very occasionally with my MBA as well, and is a reason I didn't upgrade to the 15-incher.

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!

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#46

Post by MenhirMike »

wlesieutre wrote: post #3

Random trivia, this is the last model where the Apple logo on the back of the screen is oriented to be right side up for the user when they close the display. 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.

I remember the cheers in the audience when Jobs mentioned that they rotated the logo.

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#47

Post by paulmd »

jwells89 wrote: post #16

I never owned one of these while they were contemporary (though did own a somewhat comparable iMac) but picked a 500Mhz model up a couple years ago. 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 al…

yeah, it's oft-remarked but it's extremely silly how much memory and CPU usage have been inflated over the years. 256MB was just fine for gaming in the early days of XP. windows 98 or windows 2000 could run pretty nicely on like, 64MB - a lot of people ran windows 95 on 16mb even. that's a modern, multitasking desktop OS!

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)

https://menuetos.net/

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!

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#48

Post by MenhirMike »

atdrummond wrote: post #27
gumby wrote: post #22

I had a Pismo and it was great, but IMHO the greatest of that generation was the 2400c which was the smallest powerbook, great for anyone who spent a lot of time flying around. 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 gu…

I’ve spent years trying to get back to the sub-12” notebooks of that era. 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.

I loved my 2015 Retina Macbook, though it sometimes feels like it's a minority opinion given the first gen butterfly keyboard and the single USB-C port, but it was exactly what I wanted a the time: an iPad-sized device with a keyboard and a proper OS.

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.

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#49

Post by phendrenad2 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #29

My favorite Mac laptop was my first one, a 12" G4 Powerbook. Perfect in every way. I still miss that laptop, used it up until OS X Tiger went EOL, and even a little past that with TenFourFox browser.

I love the old G4 aluminum macbooks, but man, aluminum was a bad choice for the hinges. You won't find one in 2023 that isn't broken off. Sort of like how you can't find certain models of beige PowerPC Macs that haven't had their outer plastic crumble to dust.

Re: Greatest “Classic” Mac Laptop: Powerbook G3 Pismo (2021)

#50

Post by mepian »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #33
duxup wrote: post #6

It was a good read. 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.

Imagine a modern MBP letting you turn one screw and release a couple of latches to lift out the keyboard for upgrades... 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?)

You don't even need a screwdriver for that screw, I think you can turn it with your fingernail.
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