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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)

#61

Post by jwells89 »

jeffbee wrote: post #56
NaOH wrote: post #54

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.…

With modern batteries of that size you are likely to get more like 30 hours. The last set of NewerTech batteries I had in my Pismo lasted effectively forever. And 15 years of battery technology have passed since then.

If someone made modern drop-in upgrade batteries I'd absolutely buy one for my Pismo.

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

#62

Post by fragmede »

Bradlinc wrote: post #59

I am nostalgic for this former age too, but I don’t want it back. I don’t lack for ports, swappable bays, or removable media. Sure, the Pismo could be upgraded via a new daughter card and the hard drive was easy to access but that’s because you needed to upgrade every year. Before my new M1 Macbook Air I had a 2012 Macbook Pro that lasted me about eight years. On another note: In the early 2000s I had a Lombard, 2400…

I've run out of room on my M1's upgraded 1TB drive and would love to upgrade.

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

#63

Post by Rebelgecko »

fragmede wrote: post #62
Bradlinc wrote: post #59

I am nostalgic for this former age too, but I don’t want it back. I don’t lack for ports, swappable bays, or removable media. Sure, the Pismo could be upgraded via a new daughter card and the hard drive was easy to access but that’s because you needed to upgrade every year. Before my new M1 Macbook Air I had a 2012 Macbook Pro that lasted me about eight years. On another note: In the early 2000s I had a Lombard, 2400…

I've run out of room on my M1's upgraded 1TB drive and would love to upgrade.

Imagine how the people with 128GB feel

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

#64

Post by SanjayMehta »

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 still use my 2011 11” MacBook Air. Only had to change the battery 5 years ago. iPad with keyboard just added one more device to charge.

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

#65

Post by mschaef »

paulmd wrote: post #47
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 XFC…

> a lot of people ran windows 95 on 16mb even. that's a modern, multitasking desktop OS!

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.)

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

#66

Post by jwells89 »

mschaef wrote: post #65
paulmd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 XFC…

> a lot of people ran windows 95 on 16mb even. that's a modern, multitasking desktop OS! 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 an…

I feel like I got a little glimpse of that 90s power scaling when I upgraded from a hand-me-down PowerPC 603ev 200mhz Performa to a PowerPC 400Mhz iMac. The increase in power and responsiveness was well beyond what the increase in clock speed might suggest.

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.

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

#67

Post by easeout »

NaOH wrote: post #54

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.…

If you had to pick one game to ever play, Descent is a great one.

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

#69

Post by helpfulContrib »

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'm very happy with my One Mix 4:

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.

https://gpd.hk/gpdwinmax2

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

#70

Post by slackfan »

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.

The difference in interface speed and responsiveness is tremendous. I have a few G4 machines, os9 on them is absolutely nuts in terms of speed compared to my mid-road M2 macbook with the latest osX.

Helps when you don't have to start up a dedicated web browser instance for every single application you have.

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