I have one of these PowerBooks, the 500 MHz Pismo. I bought it the day it was discontinued (intentionally), using a friend who could get it with a student discount. My memory is it cost me $2,000 between the end-of-life status and student discount. I keep it around to have an OS 9 machine and the occasional urge to play Descent (the only computer game I’ve ever played). Pretty certain I have mine set up with OS X 10.4 Tiger along with OS 9. In truth, I haven’t booted it in years.
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.