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 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.
Came here to also praise the 2400c. I finally restored mine to working condition just last week after finding a donor screen from a parts machine.
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.
+1 for the 2400c. Picked one up when I moved to SF in early 2020 and restored it (SSD + more RAM).
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.
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!
I would love to see Apple revisit this form factor with the much more capable Apple Silicon processors. I had the 12in 2017 Macbook, and it was just about perfect in every way except performance. A remarkable little machine.
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.
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.
I think this is underappreciated by the "tech press" and by a lot of people who buy on specs and fashion (feels like the first is a subset of the second): most peoples' computing needs are overserved by what's on the market.
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!
You might like the ThinkPad X230 which is a pretty nice compromise between compactness and modernity (can run latest Linux/BSD, probably Windows though not sure why someone would want to do that lol) .. has been my daily driver for a couple years. :)
I also have an X230 that I bought from a local recycler. Its small but also a bit on the chunky side when it comes to weight and thickness. I do enjoy using it though. I put a SATA SSD and a mSATA SSD in it, upped the RAM to 16GB, replaced the Bluetooth adapter with a USB plug that I have a Logitech Unify Adapter plugged into, and replaced the stock BIOS with Skulls (which also nuked most of the Intel ME) https://github.com/merge/skulls/
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.
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.
The fact that they made it glow when open is what made the decision just so weird. The only way it would glow was when it was open. So the fact that they made it not glow when they did flip it was just all sorts of whathehuh? kind of logic.
might have better fit with the reply above mine, but the huh part i assert might be related to a move of where the wifi antenna went, from a plastic body to a metal body, because it's got to "see" out. maybe the wifi antenna in the first metal body hides behind the logo, but i'm not sure.
i tried looking at ifixit teardowns and couldn't tell.
The 2013 models rotated the logo on the lid. This was the year where they shipped the awful trackpoint with no physical trackpoint buttons, just a big clickpad.
I do think it's the better way to put it, just interesting to note that this is where it flipped.
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 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.
I don't remember this being an issue at all. My 1Ghz G4 laptop was a workhorse for me for software development back then. I do remember fan noise though, and paint flaking off the case.
Completely changing the underlying architecture wasn't something that was known to always work back then, especially when it meant ditching your own PowerPC alliance. Despite the Jobs Reality Distortion Field on 11, those chips were not performant when compared to the competition. Much was promised, little was delivered.
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.
After a 25 year hiatus I've taken Descent back up, the DOS & Windows version. After you're tired of the standard levels you can find plenty of third-party and fan levels and games.
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.
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.
The 12" MacBook was in a lot of ways the spiritual successor to the 12" PowerBook and was hard to beat for portability. It's a shame it was hobbled by the hot and weak Intel CPUs of its era and butterfly keyboard… if they resurrected that form factor with an M-series CPU and improved keyboards of modern MacBooks it'd be a wonderful little machine.
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.
The various AIO LC/Performa models and the G3 Molar Mac are particularly susceptible to brittle plastics with how heavy the integrated CRTs in those are. Have seen too many disaster photos where someone had bought one of those on eBay only to have it arrive in a million pieces due to the stresses of shipping. Definitely the sort of thing one should only buy locally.
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 almost certainly a result of its mechanical HDD.
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)
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.
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!
> 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.)
I know, but windows 3.1 looked like windows 3.1. Windows 98 at least looks reasonably modern, like system 7.5+ or system 8 level fit and finish or whatever. Windows 2000 definitely is 90% of the way there in terms of UX. Windows XP really looks more or less like windows 10 if you apply classicshell and turn off the theme, or whatever.
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.
> I know, but windows 3.1 looked like windows 3.1.
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.
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.
> 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
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.)
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, 2400c, and Thinkpad 600. There is no doubt the 600 was the best built of the three. Both of the Mac’s felt cheap by comparison mostly due to their plastic (though, the Lombard screen was nicer than the 600.) I remember picking up the first aluminum unibody Macbook and thinking “finally something that is as nice as the 600!”
I had a Wallstreet that broke (the hinges were crap and broke, and then broke on the first replacement from Apple. Also the rubberized texture on the middle of the top case flaked) so it got replaced with a Lombard, which shared the clear brown keycaps with the Pismo. I always missed the black keycaps from the Wallstreet.
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.
Ports (TiBook had Ethernet, modem, full sized DVI, FireWire, USB, optical audio, s-video, and PCMCIA), upgradable memory and storage, replaceable battery, and an illuminated Apple logo ;-)
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.
My grandma had one of these and I loved it. Great machine!
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.
this was my first Apple laptop. i even had an orinoco gold wifi pcmcia card, a pringles can, a bit of all-thread, and an antenna cable, and away my friend and i went on wardriving expeditions. back then, wifi wasn't nearly as established yet, and it was fun to a couple of knuckleheads to map out locations. if only we could have known how mapping would evolve.
The Wally does have one advantage over the Pismo: it runs Rhapsody the best of any laptop (which is to say merely acceptably). If you're into system archaeology and don't want to allocate an entire desktop to that purpose, the Wally is a good fit. Rhapsody is neat, sort of OS X but where Platinum never died.
Pismos are handy with the built-in USB and Firewire but the Wallstreets make better "bridge" machines. They have SCSI that can be booted from with a BlueSCSI or PiSCSI, and the old serial ports which work with Localtalk.
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.
My mother-in-law gifted me a Wallstreet that she used in the 90s. I was almost tempted to buy a spot welder to build my own PRAM battery for it since at the time I looked there were no aftermarket ones available.
Mostly OT, but the SuperDisk (LS-120 and LS-240) were the best of the super-floppies:
- 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.
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?)
better 20 years ago: doesn't spy on you, doesn't auto-update and wipe your external drive, doesn't have constant UX regressions in every new version, doesn't harass you to sign up to cloud services, doesn't hit a network service to validate every application you run, can actually be repaired yourself, can actually be upgraded yourself... etc.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_2400c